交通基础设施建设能带动县域经济发展么?——基于2004—2013年国家级高速公路建设和县级经济面板数据的分析

Does Highway Promote Economy Development? Evidence from the China National Highway Construction during 2004—2013

基础设施建设会引起交通成本的变化进而对地方经济产生冲击。本文基于国家级高速公路开通这一外生的基础设施变化作为自然实验,利用双重差分模型检验2004年至2013年间中国国家级高速公路建设对所通过县的经济发展的影响。实证结果发现:国家级高速公路开通对所通过县的经济存在显著正向影响,连通县比非连通县GDP高出约1.4%,人均GDP高出约1.7%;相对于第一、第三产业,第二产业受高速公路开通的影响最为显著;距离大城市越远、规模越小的县城越容易受到高速公路连通带来的正向经济带动作用;分地区结果显示高速公路开通对东部、中部地区经济增长的带动作用更为明显,而在东北地区和西部地区存在异质性。此外,与以往文献不同,本文的实证分析显示,国家级高速公路开通后并未观测到促使经济活动从高速邻近县向连通县转移的再分配效应,而是对整个区域的经济增长效应。

The improvement of infrastructure can reduce transport cost and thus impacts local economy.In this paper,we employ the Difference in Difference method,and treat the national highway construction as an exogenous natural experiment to examine how transportation cost changes affect county economy between 2004 and 2013.The empirical results show that the national highway opening has a significant positive impact on local economy.The GDP of connected counties is about 1.4%higher than the non-connected counties,and the per capita GDP is about 1.7%higher than the non-connected counties.The second industry is most affected by the opening of highways;the farther away from the big cities,the smaller the county is,the more likely it is to be positively affected by the highways opening.The results of the sub-regions show that there are heterogeneous effects in the northeast and western regions,and the east and the middle counties grow faster after the highway opening.In addition,unlike the previous literature,the empirical analysis of this paper shows that we cannot observe the redistribution effect of promoting economic activities from neighboring counties but the economic growth effect of the whole region.