Research on the Relationship between Railway Network Development and Economic Growth in Central China

Abstract

The development of regional economy benefits from transportation infrastructure upgrading. Take central China as the example, based on its railway passenger and freight volumes and turnover volumes, GDP and other macro-economic data, this paper uses co-integration analysis, the error correction model and Granger causal relation test to empirically study the internal relationship between these two kinds of indexes. Results show that GDP has long-term co-integration relationship with all these transportation indexes, and the elasticity coefficients of passenger volume, passenger and freight turnover volumes to GDP are 0.5959, 14.9931 and 1.9916 respectively, among which the passenger turnover volume has a significant effect on economic growth. The construction and operation of the eight vertical and eight horizontal high-speed railway network will definitely further boost the rapid development of regional economy.