Inter-Region Transportation Costs, Regional Economic Growth, and Disparities in China

Zhaomin Zhang ()
Additional contact information
Zhaomin Zhang: School of Management, Shenzhen Polytechnic, Shenzhen 518000, China

Frontiers of Economics in China-Selected Publications from Chinese Universities, 2020, vol. 15, issue 2, 282-311

Abstract: To examine the correlation between regional economic growth and inter-region transportation costs in China, this study establishes a regional economic growth model embedded with inter-region transportation costs based on the Cobb-Douglas production function. Based on a balanced growth empirical model, this study verifies the correlation by conducting a regression analysis of the panel data of 29 provinces, municipalities, and autonomous regions from 1985 to 2015. The empirical results show that: (1) The per capita GDP growth among the three regions (namely, the eastern, central, and western regions of China) meets a conditional convergence trend, and the decreasing of the inter-region transportation costs increases the convergence speed; (2) The per capita GDP growth is in line with the club convergence trend within each of the three regions; (3) The trend of the output elasticity of the inter-region transportation costs shows that the gradual decrease of inter-region transportation costs has a positive correlation with the narrowing of economic disparity after the year 2000, accelerating "common prosperity" across different regions in China.

Keywords: inter-region transportation costs; regional economic growth; growth differentials; panel data (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O11 O18 R11 R13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://journal.hep.com.cn/fec/EN/10.3868/s060-011-020-0013-0 (application/pdf)

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:fec:journl:v:15:y:2020:i:2:p:282-311

Access Statistics for this article

Frontiers of Economics in China-Selected Publications from Chinese Universities is currently edited by LONG Jie

More articles in Frontiers of Economics in China-Selected Publications from Chinese Universities from Higher Education Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Frank H. Liu ().