China's Dazzling Transport-infrastructure Growth: Measurement and Effects
Peter Egger,
Gabriel Loumeau and
Nicole Loumeau
No 15372, CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers
Abstract:
We document an unprecedented change in the size and the quality of China's transport-infrastructure network between 2000 and 2013. This documentation is based on hand-collected and digitized data on roads and railways. The changes are summarized and portrayed as shortest-possible transport 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 migration, suggests that the long-run consequences of the transport-infrastructure changes induce regional convergence of lagging-behind prefectures in terms of population density and, to a lesser extent, in terms 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. Key drivers behind the effects are the facilitation of goods transport as well as technology diffusion, while the reduction of mobility costs and the diffusion of amenities appear less important.
Keywords: Transport infrastructure; Regional economics; General-equilibrium models; Structural estimation; Migration; Transportation problem (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F14 R13 R41 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-geo, nep-tre and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:
Downloads: (external link)
https://cepr.org/publications/DP15372 (application/pdf)
CEPR Discussion Papers are free to download for our researchers, subscribers and members. If you fall into one of these categories but have trouble downloading our papers, please contact us at subscribers@cepr.org
Related works:
Journal Article: China's dazzling transport-infrastructure growth: Measurement and effects (2023) 
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:15372
Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
https://cepr.org/publications/DP15372
Access Statistics for this paper
More papers in CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers Centre for Economic Policy Research, 33 Great Sutton Street, London EC1V 0DX.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().