Roads, Railroads, and Decentralization of Chinese Cities

Nathaniel Baum-Snow, Loren Brandt (), J. Vernon Henderson, Matthew Turner and Qinghua Zhang
Additional contact information
Qinghua Zhang: Peking University

The Review of Economics and Statistics, 2017, vol. 99, issue 3, 435-448

Abstract: We investigate how urban railroad and highway configurations have influenced urban form in Chinese cities since 1990. Each radial highway displaces 4% of central city population to surrounding regions, and ring roads displace about an additional 20%, with stronger effects in the richer coastal and central regions. Each radial railroad reduces central city industrial GDP by about 20%, with ring roads displacing an additional 50%. We provide evidence that radial highways decentralize service sector activity, radial railroads decentralize industrial activity, and ring roads decentralize both. Historical transportation infrastructure provides identifying variation in more recent measures of infrastructure.

Date: 2017
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (215)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/REST_a_00660 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: Roads, railroads and decentralization of Chinese cities (2017)
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:tpr:restat:v:99:y:2017:i:3:p:435-448

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://mitpressjour ... rnal/?issn=0034-6535

Access Statistics for this article

The Review of Economics and Statistics is currently edited by Pierre Azoulay, Olivier Coibion, Will Dobbie, Raymond Fisman, Benjamin R. Handel, Brian A. Jacob, Kareen Rozen, Xiaoxia Shi, Tavneet Suri and Yi Xu

More articles in The Review of Economics and Statistics from MIT Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Kelly McDougall ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).