The Impact of High-Speed Rail on Economic Development: A County-Level Analysis

Abstract

High-speed rail has an important impact on the location choices of enterprises and the labor force, which is reflected in a complex space–time process. Previous studies have been unable to show the change characteristics between enterprises and the labor force at the county level. Therefore, based on the new economic geography theory, we first constructed a theoretical analysis framework to explore high-speed railway’s impact on county economy development and then obtained the two economic subdivision factors’ impacts: industrial enterprises and secondary labor force. Then, based on the panel data of 1791 county units in China from 2003 to 2019, the study constructed a multi-period PSM-DID model to empirically explore high-speed rail’s impact on the county’s agglomeration of industrial enterprises and secondary labor force. The results show that high-speed rail has a long-term negative effect on the county area’s agglomeration of industrial enterprises. From the perspective of the labor force, high-speed rail has a long-term and continuous positive effect on the agglomeration of the secondary labor force in county units.