The Impact Of High-Speed Railway On High Quality Development Of Urban Economy

With the transition of China’s economic growth from the previous quantity into quality,the urban economy quickly embarks on the transformation road of high-quality development.As a modern means of transportation,the opening of high-speed rail has a profound impact on the development and trend of urban economy.This thesis studies the relationship between the opening of high-speed rail and the high-quality development of urban economy,aiming to provide empirical support for the construction of high-speed rail network and the high-quality development of urban economy.This thesis takes cities as the research object.Firstly,it constructs the index system of urban economic high-quality development from six dimensions of factor input efficiency,innovative development,coordinated development,open development,green development and shared development,and uses entropy method to measure the economic high-qualing development index of 286 cities above prefecture level in China.Then,based on the panel data of China’s cities from 2008 to 2018,a multi-stage did panel model is established to empirically test the impact of the opening of high-speed rail on the high-quality development of China’s urban economy in general,different geographical locations and different city sizes,and a series of robust tests including psm-did and counterfactual test are carried out on the empirical results.Finally,we use the stepwise regression model of mediating effect to explore the specific path of high-speed rail opening affecting the high-quality development of urban economy,and use Sobel model to further test the mediating effectThe result suggests that,firstly,high-speed railway can obviously help the China’s urban economy to high-quality develop during the sample investigation period.Second,the heterogeneity analysis of the East,the West and the East shows that the opening of high-speed rail has a significant role in promoting the high-quality economic development of the central and western regions,and has a greater role in promoting the western region,while the role in promoting the high-quality economic development of the eastern region is not obvious.The difference analysis between the north and the south indicates that the facilitation of high-speed railway on the high-quality development of urban economy in southern China is more than that in northern China.Based on the heterogeneity analysis of different city sizes,the results show that due to the perfect transportation infrastructure and the "siphon effect" brought by the opening of high-speed rail,the quality of economic development in mega cities and small and medium-sized cities has not been significantly improved due to the opening of high-speed rail,while the quality of economic development in big cities has been improved obviously.Thirdly,the results of impact path analysis show that the opening of high-speed rail can effectively improve the quality of urban development by driving technological innovation,improving environmental quality and promoting industrial agglomeration.