Transportation Infrastructure And Regional Economic Agglomeration

The report of the 19 th National Congress emphasized that China must “strengthen infrastructure construction of water conservancy,railways,highways,waterage,aviation,pipelines,power grids,information,logistics,etc.”.And it's need to take efforts to create a “powerful country in traffic”.To create networks of cities and towns based on city clusters,enabling the coordinated development of cities of different sizes and small towns is the demand of achieving economic and social regional coordinated development.It can be seen that the influence of infrastructure such as transportation on the economic and social development and regional coordination in China in recent years is indisputable.Based on a systematic review of Adam Smith's economic agglomeration theory,and many scholars' researches on the relationship between transport and economic activities based on different theories,this paper focuses on the relationship between transport infrastructure and economic agglomeration.With reference to the theory of new economic geography,appropriate extensions are made in the model that matches the purpose of the study better.The selected model is a linear free entrepreneur model based on increasing returns to scale and monopolistic competition assumptions,and the transportation infrastructure variables are directly introduced into the model through iceberg costs.So the relationship between transportation infrastructure and economic agglomeration is answered from the perspective of theoretical analysis.Secondly,with reference to the relevant existing research results,a spatial autocorrelation model was used to analyze the panel data of 29 provincial units in China from 2004 to 2016,and spatial effects were included in the quantitative analysis.This part answers the problems from the perspective of empirical analysis,and gives support for the previous theoretical analysis.The study shows that,first,the quality of transportation infrastructure conditions will,to a large extent,affect the economic development level and development prospects in a region.The transportation infrastructure facilitates the inter-relationship between regions and,to a large extent,reduces transaction costs.The role will not only help reduce the operating costs of the individual enterprises,but also expand the scope of the market that the company can radiate,thereby promoting the formation of economic agglomeration.Second,the status of transportation infrastructure affects the pricing strategy of enterprises and the choice of profit maximization,which results in differences in the actual rate of return of human capital that can flow between regions.The difference in the actual rate of return of human capital will inevitably lead to the spatial flow of factors,and the relative size of the market will change accordingly.Third,there are differences in the impact of different types of transport infrastructure on economic agglomeration and economic activities.The richness of railway mileage in a region has the largest and significant positive impact on economic agglomeration,followed by highways and Class I highways.From the provincial level,the communication between the regions and the main channel has a strong positive significance for economic agglomeration.Therefore,when building transportation infrastructure,it is necessary to provide large-scale supply,take the government as the leading factor,innovate and utilize social capital,and provide rich infrastructure at a relatively low cost in a relatively short period of time.Secondly,the construction of transport infrastructure should be coordinated,fully taking into account its impact on relevant regions,realizing regional coordination,paying attention to the coordination of the supply structure,and avoiding unfair investment.Finally,the construction of transportation infrastructure should be systematic and improve the “capillary” under the backbone network.Systematic transport supply should pay attention to the construction strategy of “taking a point to a surface” and “using a mesh surface”,and incorporate the regional market into the national market through the national trunk road network.