High-Speed Rail and Urban Growth Disparity: Evidence from China

Abstract

We investigate the effects of high-speed rail (HSR) operation on urban growth disparity in China. Using urban panel data from 2005 to 2019 and difference-in-differences estimation, we find that the operation of HSR has exerted a strong and robust positive effect on urban growth and total factor productivity (TFP) in core cities, while this effect is much weaker in non-core cities, especially in non-core cities close to provincial capitals. Meanwhile, high-speed rail has triggered relatively slower urban growth in the central cities compared with the suburbs in regional primate prefectures. The results suggest that the extension of HSR promotes centralization across cities and local decentralization within regional primate cities.

Spatial Structure Evolution and Economic Benefits of Rapidly Expanding the High-Speed Rail Network in Developing Regions: A Case Study in Western China

“…Second, the main contribution of this paper is to not only confirm the benefits of the HSR network structure and the network status of cities to cities, but also to explore the mechanisms of intra-regional connectivity and participation in the global network connectivity structure for sustainable economic development. Most studies have focused on the national level or on a specific city agglomeration, and there is a lack of studies that address HSR networks that include multiple provincial regions [35,37,43]. Liu et al [75] discuss the impact of network structure on sustainable economic development at the national level and confirm in their study that different regional network structures have different effects on economic development, but are limited to cross-sectional comparisons between individual regions.…”

“…In studies of regional economic integration, high-speed rail systems are able to generate the decentralization of economic geographic distribution by changing accessibility, which, in turn, leads to a polarized scenario of regional development [31][32][33]. Economic activities are clustered from distant areas to the core through changes in accessibility and are dispersed, from the core to the periphery [34,35]. Most studies confirm that HSR systems only bring more lucrative economic benefits to economically prosperous regions [36][37][38][39].…”