How Do High-Speed Railways Facilitate High-Quality Urban Development: Evidence from China

Abstract

In 2017, China released the statement of High-Quality Development in response to the sustainable development goals proposed by the United Nations. As the spatial carriers of human economic, social, and cultural development, cities should be updated in order to enter a new period of high-quality urban development. In this paper, we use a multi-period DID model, consider the opening of high-speed railways as a quasi-natural experiment, and use the panel data of 285 prefecture-level and above cities in China from 2007 to 2020 to empirically analyze the effect of high-speed railway (HSR) opening on urban development quality and explore its transmission mechanism. The empirical results find that the HSR opening can significantly promote the level of high-quality urban development. The results remain the same after robustness tests such as PSM-DID and placebo tests. The study mechanism suggests that the HSR opening can significantly improve the quality of urban development through a population agglomeration effect, while capital agglomeration has a masking effect between the HSR opening and high-quality urban development. Further results show that there is heterogeneity in the impact of HSR opening on the high-quality development of cities in different regions and sizes, in which the boosting effect of HSR opening on the development quality of cities in eastern and western regions is more significant compared to cities in central regions; the boosting effect of HSR opening on the high-quality development level of medium-sized cities is stronger.