Abstract
This paper aims to provide an examination of the general and heterogeneous allowed treatment effects of high-speed rail (HSR) on tourism in cities in China. Based on the implementation of a generalized difference-in-differences (GDID) model and a dose–response (DR) assessment under a quasi-experimental background, this study found significant evidence of a positive average effect of HSR operation on tourism development for both domestic and international tourism. The event study indicates that the counterfactual method implied in this paper is valid, since the parallel trend assumption is confirmed, and the treatment effect of HSR on city tourism has an upwardly increasing trend over time. The heterogeneity test, which separates large cities from medium-sized and small cities, shows that the effect is quite different for the two city types; the effect is not optimistic for large cities, but it is consistently positive for medium-sized and small cities. As an original contribution, this paper conducts a DR study, allowing heterogeneous treatment effects to be captured when cities have different HSR development statuses. This novel method relaxes the strong assumption that there is only one effect level on average for all cities. The results argue that cities with higher HSR development will enjoy more benefits in terms of arrivals and revenues both from home and abroad; however, there are significant differences for the two city groups, as well as for domestic and international tourism. Thus, the findings can offer important information for policy decision making and serve as a valuable reference for research, especially regarding the conclusion drawn from the heterogeneity effect based on city size and HSR development status.
Highlights
High-speed rail (HSR) construction has been one of the most remarkable moves taken by the Chinese government in the past 10 years [1], and the tourism industry, which is strongly tied to transportation infrastructure [2], is absolutely correlated with HSR
With the interaction term HSR × Post, Table 2 shows that the treatment effects are significantly positive overall both without and with the control variables overall, and these results are maintained and robust for both domestic and international tourism and for both the number of tourists and tourism revenue
HSR operation causes domestic tourist arrivals to increase by 3.41 million and international arrivals to increase by 0.05 million; tourism revenue increased by 2.94 billion and 0.40 billion yuan for domestic and foreign tourism, respectively. This result is consistent with Gao et al [24], who found that arrivals increased, but the tourism revenue differed
Summary
High-speed rail (HSR) construction has been one of the most remarkable moves taken by the Chinese government in the past 10 years [1], and the tourism industry, which is strongly tied to transportation infrastructure [2], is absolutely correlated with HSR. HSR has significantly shortened the travel time between cities and regions; it is believed that the spillover effects of these rail networks will bring certain benefits and advantages for both tourists and the development of the tourism industry [3]. The major work of this paper is to provide an empirical test of the influence of this specific type of infrastructure, taking the operation of HSR as a quasi-experiment under a generalized difference-in-differences (GDID) model and using panel data on more than 300 Chinese cities from 2003 to 2015
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