China's dazzling transport-infrastructure growth: Measurement and effects

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Egger, Peter H.; Loumeau, Gabriel; Loumeau, Nicole
• 刊物名称: JOURNAL OF INTERNATIONAL ECONOMICS
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0022-1996
• DOI: 10.1016/j.jinteco.2023.103734
• 发表日期: 2023
• 关键词: Transport infrastructure; regional economics; General-equilibrium models; structural estimation; migration; Transportation problem

摘要

We document an unprecedented change in the size and the quality of China's transport -infrastructure network between 2000 and 2013 based on hand-collected and digitized data on roads and railways. The changes are summarized and portrayed as shortest-possible trans-port times of people and goods between 330 prefectures of mainland China. A quantitative model of China's prefectures and a Rest of the World, featuring both goods trade and migra-tion, suggests that the transport-infrastructure changes induced regional convergence of lagging-behind prefectures in terms of population density and, to a lesser extent, of real per -capita income. Not only changes in highway and high-speed-railway networks but also ones in lower-level road and railway networks are quantitatively important.(c) 2023 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).