Track: Transportation and Traffic

Abstract

Transportation is an important contributor to economic growth and development of a country as it facilitates easy movement of goods and resources. One of the indicators of a country’s economic development is GDP. In this paper, we discuss the rapid penetration of high speed railways (HSR) in China within a short span of two decades and its impact on the local economy. For our research, we chose the Wuhan Guangzhou Line that began operations in 2011. We compute the theoretical regional gross development product (RGDP) of six cities that are along this line and three cities which are not connected by any HSR lines by using regression analysis.  Independent variables in our study are population, employment, capex investment in land assets, length of highways and higher education strength. Dependent variable is the RGDP and we used data from 2006 to 2019. We benchmarked the change in theoretical RGDP over the years with the actual RGDP. Our results indicate that cities along the HSR line have an increase in their RGDP, whereas cities that are not along the HSR line have a decrease in RGDP. We infer that a HSR (or a transport infrastructure) that facilitates ease movement of goods and services has a positive impact on the region’s growth; however, this could also adversely impact the neighbourhood that are not directly connected by the HSR. We would like to possibly extend our model to analyse the regional growth of European countries and the influence of HSR on it. We believe that it will be an interesting contribution, as our model benchmarks within-the country growth in China, whereas it would be across the countries in Europe.