Has the transport-led economic growth effect reached a peak in China? A panel threshold regression approach

Taotao Deng (), Shuai Shao, Lili Yang and Xueliang Zhang

Transportation, 2014, vol. 41, issue 3, 567-587

Abstract: Using China’s province-level panel data from 1987 to 2010, this study explores the optimal level of transport infrastructure accumulation maximizing the growth rate. We investigate under what circumstances can additional transportation infrastructure capacity positively affect economic growth, based on panel threshold regression models. Our empirical findings suggest that there is a non-monotonic relationship between the stock of transport infrastructure and the long-run growth rate. The magnitude of transport-led economic growth effect significantly depends on the level of the existing transport network. The empirical results identify two endogenous cut-off points of efficiency of transport-led economic growth effect. When the highway network density is lower than 0.17 km/km 2 , an insignificant positive relationship between highway infrastructure accumulation and economic growth was found. When the highway density is estimated between 0.17 and 0.38 km/km 2 or higher than 0.38 km/km 2 , expanding the highway network has a significant positive effect on economic growth, but the magnitude of the impact is weaker in the latter, with the estimated coefficients equal to 0.23 and 0.09 respectively. Although China still enjoys a positive economic growth effect led by building more large-scale highway infrastructure, the magnitude of the effects of most provinces in China has already passed the saturation point and continuously expanding the highway network is not very productive. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media New York 2014

Keywords: Transport infrastructure; Economic growth; Panel threshold regression; Highway network; Non-monotonic relationship (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (18)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s11116-013-9503-4 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:kap:transp:v:41:y:2014:i:3:p:567-587

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... ce/journal/11116/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s11116-013-9503-4

Access Statistics for this article

Transportation is currently edited by Kay W. Axhausen

More articles in Transportation from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().