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.

摘要

研究高铁（HSR）对当地经济的影响对于政策制定者和学者来说具有重要意义和兴趣。尽管在这一领域有大量文献，但对这种影响的估计是不一致的，甚至是矛盾的。由于以下几个原因，经验证据仍然存在问题：内生路线布局；遗漏变量偏差；不同地区的异质性；各种混杂因素。在本文中，我们通过构建适当的反事实来评估这种影响，在高铁服务首次亮相之前，在没有类似 GDP 水平和 GDP 趋势的高铁服务的情况下。对照组与治疗组形成良好的拟合，2007年以前对照组的经济表现甚至略强于治疗组。使用DID方法，我们发现高铁网络将地方 GDP 提高了大约 3.3 个百分点。高铁服务的引入帮助城市吸引了更多的工业企业，实现了更多的工业产出，但对服务业的影响并不明显。我们的结果对不同的样本选择程序、动态分析和不同的经验策略都是稳健的。因此，我们的研究为高铁有利于地方经济发展的论点提供了新的、坚实的实证支持。