Abstract
Transportation infrastructure, which has always been regarded as an important element to promote regional innovation, accelerates factor flows and productivity spillovers. In February 2021, the State Council of China issued the outline of national integrated multidimensional transportation network planning (2021–2050), which proposed that during the 14th Five-Year Plan period, the Yangtze River Delta would speed up the construction of an integrated transport network to serve the dual circulation development pattern in China. However, few studies have systematically investigated the development of integrated transport in the Yangtze River Delta, especially the relationship between transport operating efficiency and regional innovation based on the theory of flow space. This study aims to calculate the integrated transport efficiency of 26 cities in the Yangtze River Delta and analyse the spillover effect of efficiency improvement on urban innovation. The results reveal that integrated transport efficiency is relatively stable at approximately 0.92. We find that the local innovation value would increase by 0.119% with every 1% increase in transport efficiency, and it would exceed 0.26% after introducing spatial factors. The spillover effect on the surrounding cities is significantly higher than that in the cities themselves, and the result is 0.292 under the economic spatial distance weight matrix. These findings will support the construction of the integrated transport network and provide useful references for government decision makers in the Yangtze River Delta.
Highlights
As a representative of the new economic geography, Castells opened a new era of studying urban innovation from the perspective of flow space by stating that material flows can realize space-time sharing without geographical proximity [1]
Through the global autocorrelation test of urban innovation and integrated transport efficiency in the Yangtze River Delta, the results show that the two indicators are both positively correlated under the three types of weight matrices, and the Moran’s I coefficient is the highest in the economic spatial distance weight matrix and the lowest in the time distance weight matrix, which illustrates that the influence of economic factors on the spatial dependence between cities cannot be ignored
The efficiency of the integrated transport industry was calculated by the super-efficiency data envelopment analysis (DEA) model, and the results showed that the average efficiency has reached 0.92
Summary
As a representative of the new economic geography, Castells opened a new era of studying urban innovation from the perspective of flow space by stating that material flows can realize space-time sharing without geographical proximity [1]. The theory of flow space mainly includes four aspects: network flow, network city, dual city and infinite time. Does the construction of an integrated transport network promote urban innovation?
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