Infrastructure and the patterns of trade: An empirical look at China

Shuaihang Li, Qihong Liu and Qing Liu

China Economic Review, 2024, vol. 88, issue C

Abstract: Transport infrastructure plays an important role in economic growth, particularly for developing countries. Recently a burgeoning literature explores how transport infrastructure facilitates economic growth via the channel of trade. In this paper, we study this question in the context of China, but with several distinctions. First, we distinguish firms from different regions in China, and see how their trade behavior responds differently to changes in infrastructure. Second, we consider both export and domestic sales, with an eye toward the interplay between the two channels. Our estimation results reveal the presence of both regional heterogeneity and sales channel competition. For in-land provinces, an improvement in their transport infrastructure raises firms’ exports at the cost of domestic sales. Interestingly, the results are reversed for coastal provinces, mainly driven by non-coastal cities of coastal provinces (rather than coastal cities). We also find negative spatial spillover, in the sense that neighboring provinces tend to compete with rather than complement each other. Our analysis has important policy implications under the current geopolitical tension and policy initiatives (e.g. dual circulation in China).

Keywords: Transport infrastructure; Patterns of trade; Regional heterogeneity; Sales channel competition (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F10 F19 R12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1043951X24001858
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
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:eee:chieco:v:88:y:2024:i:c:s1043951x24001858

DOI: 10.1016/j.chieco.2024.102296

Access Statistics for this article

China Economic Review is currently edited by B.M. Fleisher, K. X. D. Huang, M.E. Lovely, Y. Wen, X. Zhang and X. Zhu

More articles in China Economic Review from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().