A Research About The Effect Of Transportation Infrastructure On Economic Agglomeration

The 19 th National Congress of the Communist Party pointed out that regional development imbalance is an important issue,which not only seriously affects the Chinese economy's sustained development,but also jeopardizes social stability.The transportation infrastructure determines the spatial distribution of economic resources,and the spatial allocation of economic resources affects urban economic development.With clarifying the mechanism between transportation infrastructure and urban economic agglomeration,not only important for transportation infrastructure greatly influence urban economic agglomeration,but also important to the current regional economic imbalance in China.At present,the literatures on transport infrastructure and economic agglomeration have different results using different metrics.And few studies focus on urban internal road systems,maybe omit endogenous or suppressing effects.Therefore,the paper attempts to enrich the research,and discusses the relationship between transportation infrastructure and urban economic agglomeration from the perspective of theory and evidence.In theoretical part,the paper uses the theory of location and new economic geography,to study the mechanism of transportation infrastructure and urban economic agglomeration on the view of urban accessibility and crowding effect.In empirical part,the paper uses the panel data of 284 prefecture-level cities in China from 2001 to 2015 to construct a two-way fixed effect model;then use the intersection of the road density and time dummy variables in the Ming Dynasty to solve endogenous problem;then narrowing the sample data and lagging one-stage explanatory variables for robustness test;then,in order to test whether the impact of transportation infrastructure on economic agglomeration is heterogeneous in different regions and populations,the paper divides the data into the eastern,central and western regions,and divides the large cities and small cities according to the population size.Finally,the paper adds the secondary items of the traffic infrastructure agent variables,to verify whether the traffic infrastructure�s U-shaped effect.Theoretical research result shows that the transportation infrastructure mainly affects the urban economic agglomeration by affecting the city accessibility and crowding effect.The empirical research results show that the improvement of transportation infrastructure can promote urban economic agglomeration,and effects are significant different between different population sizes and geographical locations.The big and small city�s transportation infrastructure have a significant positive impact on urban economic agglomeration.The impact of big city is greater than small city;the eastern and central regions have positive impacts,and the eastern region's impact force is greater than the central region,while the western region has not yet had an impact.In addition,the transportation infrastructure has a one-way promotion effect on economic agglomeration,and traffic infrastructure�s U-shaped effect has not appeared.Based on theoretical analysis and empirical research,the paper proposes corresponding policy recommendations on how transportation infrastructure influence economic agglomeration.(1)The central government should increase the support of the central and western regions;(2)the government should scientifically plan the construction of urban transportation infrastructure.