The effects of infrastructure investment on economic development in China, with specific focus on High-Speed Railways
Relevant studies about the relationship between transport and economic development is not a new research area. Many advocates and policy makers believe that investment in transport projects can stimulate the economy in different ways. However, the impact of transportation projects on economic development is still very difficult to measure due to the underlying complexity of this topic. This is precisely the focus and contribution of this thesis. From the 1990s, the Chinese government started to plan the national High Speed Railway (HSR) development to alleviate the pressure on the conventional railway system. The first well-known HSR (‘Jing-Jin” railway) was introduced in 2008 to connect Beijing and Tianjin. Ever since then, a massive and rapid development of HSR has been introduced in various places of China, providing many scholars a unique opportunity to evaluate national scale transport investment. This thesis aims to analyze the impact of such remarkable HSR development in China from different perspectives. HSR can certainly change the spatial pattern of China due to its advantages in efficiency, comfortability and sustainability. The transport gap between the coastal line area and inland of China might be significantly reduced due to the shrinkage of time-space map caused by the provision of HSR services. Therefore, this thesis discusses the impact of HSR, from spatial perspective, by developing an accessibility measure index based on railway timetable data and then evaluating the accessibility changes for each prefecture-level city. From the macroeconomic perspective, utilizing the results from accessibility measure index to a production function model, this thesis produces significant results in terms of changing the accessibility level on economic growth, accounting for spatial interrelationships between prefecture level cities. On the other hand, this thesis also develops a micro founded agent-based model to analyze the causal relationship between HSR and economic development, and empirically verify the results from the microeconomic perspective. Based on the empirical investigations in this thesis, HSR should be treated as a ‘necessary’ but not ‘sufficient’ condition for economic development. In addition, knowing its potential in terms of its impact on economic growth, it is beneficial to many stakeholders.
High-Speed Railways, Economic Development, Spatial Economics, Accessibility, Train Timetable, Agent based modelling
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