High-speed rail to prosperity? Assessing the role of transportation improvement in the urban economy

Abstract

Investigate the impact of high-speed rail (HSR) on local economy is of great importance and interest to policy makers and scholars. Though there is a big body of literature in this area, the estimates of such impact are inconsistent or even contradictory. The empirical evidence remains problematic for several reasons: endogenous route placement; omitted variable bias; heterogeneity across different regions; various confounding factors. In this paper, we assess this impact by constructing the appropriate counterfactual in the absence of HSR services with similar GDP level and GDP trend before the debut of HSR services. The control group forms a good fit for the treatment group, and the economic performance of the control group was even slightly stronger than that of the treatment group before 2007. Using the DID method, we find the HSR network promoted local GDP by approximately 3.3 percentage points. The introduction of HSR service helped cities attract more industrial enterprises and achieve more industrial output, but its effect on the service sector was not pronounced. Our results are robust to different sample selection procedures, to the dynamic analyses, to different empirical strategies. Our study thus provides new and solid empirical support to the argument that HSR benefits local economic development.

Research on the Evolution Characteristics and Synergistic Relationship between HSR Network and Economic Network in Hubei Province

“…Secondly, the focus is on the economic effect of the HSR network; research mainly focuses on the impact of HSR construction on economic growth and the reconstructing effect on the regional spatial pattern [15], such as the space-time convergence effect, corridor effect, siphon effect, and city integration effect. Wetwitoo et al [16] empirically investigated an association of HSR with regional economic productivity in the case of Japanese HSR, where scholars have not reached a consensus on whether HSR can promote regional economic growth [17].…”

The Impacts of High-Speed Rail on Producer Service Industry Agglomeration: Evidence from China’s Yangtze River Delta Urban Agglomeration

“…The HSR has promoted the upgrading of industrial structure and has a significant impact on service industry agglomeration [27]. Some studies believe that HSR service is more likely to attract more industrial enterprises and increase industrial output, but the impact on the service industry is not obvious [28]. That being the case, how does the opening of an HSR affect the spatial distribution of the producer service industry and its subdivision industries (agglomeration or diffusion)?…”