Influence Of High-speed Rail Network On Urban Economic Growth From Nonlinear Perspective

The grand blueprint of the "eight vertical and eight horizontal" high-speed railway network has been drawn,marking the heyday of China’s high-speed railway construction.With the construction of high-speed rail,China already has the longest high-speed rail line in the world,becoming the country with the longest high-speed railway,the highest traffic density and the largest construction scale in the world.The opening of high-speed rail has not only changed the way people travel,but also reshaped the spatial layout of China’s economic structure.Based on the reference and integration of the research results of related disciplines,this paper attempts to describe the location advantages of cities in the high-speed rail network from the perspective of social network analysis,and studies the nonlinear impact of high-speed rail network on urban economic growth with the panel threshold model,which will provide a new idea for the research in this field.Based on the panel data of 206 prefecture-level and above cities in China from 2008 to 2018,this paper explores the economic effects of high-speed rail networks using a combination of mechanism analysis and empirical analysis.Firstly,the influence mechanism of high-speed rail network on urban economic growth is analyzed by summarizing existing literature and related theories.Secondly,the weighted degree centrality and betweenness centrality of high-speed rail cities are calculated in use of social network analysis,and the importance and location change trend of China’s high-speed rail cities in high-speed rail network are depicted.Finally,the threshold panel model is used to explore the non-linear impact of high-speed rail network on urban economy,with weighting centrality and betweenness centrality as the core explanatory variables.Meanwhile,heterogeneity tests are conducted based on different city sizes and locations.The innovation point of this paper is to study the high-speed rail network,using the concept of network effect to investigate the nonlinear impact of high-speed rail on economic growth.Through the analysis of the influence mechanism and empirical research,this paper draws the following conclusions: High-speed rail network has a nonlinear impact on urban economy,and the positive promoting effect of high-speed rail network on urban economic growth decreases with the increase of centrality,that is,there is an optimal range of the promoting effect of high-speed rail construction on per capita GDP.For large cities and medium-sized cities,high-speed rail network has a nonlinear impact on urban economy,and the degree of impact is lower with the increase of weighting centrality.For small cities,there is a linear positive promoting effect of high-speed rail on urban economy,and small cities have greater promoting effect of high-speed rail on economy.For cities in the eastern,central and western regions,the positive promoting effect of high-speed rail network on urban per capita GDP slows down with the increase of weighted degree centrality.Meanwhile,China’s high-speed rail network has the largest promoting effect on economic development in the western regions.