交通基础设施改善与家庭旅游消费——来自“高铁县”的经验证据

Improved Transportation Infrastructure and Household Tourism Consumption:Empirical Evidence from Counties with High-speed Railway

科学评估交通基础设施改善对于微观家庭福利变化的影响具有重要现实意义。本文匹配2012~2018年县域高铁开通数据和中国家庭金融调查数据,利用双重差分法考察了高铁开通对于家庭旅游消费的影响。研究发现,县域高铁开通显著促进了本地家庭的旅游行为,相较于“非高铁县”的家庭而言,“高铁县”家庭的平均旅游出行概率和旅游消费金额均明显更高,一系列稳健性检验后结论仍然不变。机制分析发现,高铁开通对家庭旅游消费的带动效应主要通过改善出行条件、增加出行人次、扩大出行半径,以及促进家庭就业和收入增长等渠道来实现。异质性分析表明,对于闲暇时间更充裕的家庭而言,高铁开通对其旅游消费的提升作用更强,高铁也更促进了家庭的短期污染规避行为。本文从微观视角研究了“高铁时代”的旅游经济发展,为进一步扩大内需,助力国内大循环提供经验证据。

In the context of the“double-cycle”strategy,which focuses on domestic circulation,it is of great practical significance to study how to enhance the role of tourism as the main engine for boosting consumption to further expand domestic demand and stimulate domestic consumption potential.Improving transportation infrastructure is a key issue in the development of the tourism economy. Highspeed railroads(HSRs)have basically become the preferred means of transportation for long-distance travel of Chinese residents because of the advantages of comfort,safety,convenience,and punctuality,which have greatly promoted the development of the tourism industry. However,at present,studies on HSR and tourism are mainly carried out from macro perspectives,such as tourism economic growth and tourism spatial pattern,lacking a more microscopic assessment of the effects of household tourism consumption. This study matches the data on the opening of HSRs in counties from 2012 to 2018 with data from the China Household Finance Survey and utilizes the difference-in-differences method to study the impact of improvement in transportation infrastructure caused by the opening of HSRs in counties on household tourism consumption.This study found the following. First,the opening of HSRs in counties significantly promotes the travel consumption intention and consumption amount of local households,and the conclusions remain unchanged after a series of rigorous robustness tests,such as excluding other modes of travel,eliminating potential time-varying omitted variables,conducting instrumental variable estimation,excluding county spillover effects, using treatment group subsamples, and conducting propensity score matching difference-in-differences estimation. Second,the mechanism analysis found that the driving effect of the opening of an HSR on household tourism consumption mainly comes from the main influence channels of improving travel conditions,increasing the number of trips,expanding travel radius,and promoting employment and income growth. Third,the heterogeneity analysis reveals that the promoting effect of the opening of an HSR on household tourism is significantly affected by a household's leisure time and the local environmental conditions. Further,an HSR increases the tourism of households with more leisure time consumption and promotes households' short-term pollution avoidance behavior.The marginal contributions of this study are mainly in three areas. First,household tourism behavior plays an important role in boosting domestic demand and promoting consumption,but the existing literature mainly focuses on the microeconomic effects of the opening of an HSR from the perspective of employment and income,while the literature on the HSR and tourism mainly focuses on the macro-and meso-levels,with fewer investigations based on micro-data. This study affirms the positive impact of HSR construction on household tourism consumption,which not only supplements research on the microeconomic effect of HSR from the consumption side but also expands the exploration of the tourism economic effect of HSR from the household tourism consumption level,enriching the content and perspective of the current research. Second,part of the literature focuses on the impact of HSR on the decision-making behavior and utility of tourism consumers,but most of them do not discuss the tourism consumption effect of HSR under the framework of rigorous causal inference,and the data are limited to regional or selective survey data,which makes the study insufficiently valid internally and externally.Based on nationally representative large-scale micro household survey data,this study utilizes the difference-in-differences method to identify household tourism consumption effects caused by the opening of an HSR and uses the more exogenous county-level HSR stations for matching. It also uses various robustness tests such as instrumental variable estimation to eliminate the interfering factors of causal identification as much as possible and enhance the credibility of the study. Finally,due to certain deficiencies in the existing literature in terms of research content and methodological data,the overall impact of the opening of HSR on household tourism consumption,especially the mechanism of influence and the heterogeneous effects under different conditions,has not been fully discussed. Tourism is essentially a manifestation of the pursuit of“quality”life by the“rich”and“free”groups. This study examines the impact of improved travel conditions and household income levels caused by the opening of an HSR on household tourism and confirms the heterogeneous effects of leisure time and air quality,which provides evidence to support the understanding of the current driving factors and conditions of household tourism as well as policy insights to further promote the upgrading of household consumption and the growth of the tourism economy.