Are China's HSR tariff affordable and economic equitable? An international comparison perspective

While the issues of high-speed rail (HSR) tariff and its impact on equity have always been a hot topic in China, which also attracted the attention of international researchers, research on the level of HSR tariff from the perspective of individual affordability and equity issue have scarcely been considered. This study therefore aims to fill the research gap by quantifying the HSR relative tariff level and its impact on income/regional distribution via introducing a HSR affordability index.Based on the index, we calculate the HSR affordability levels of the main international sample countries with the order of magnitude. Then we expand the analysis of HSR affordability level according to differentiated HSR pricing practice in the selected countries. At the same time, we compare the HSR tariff impact on economic equity among different countries, regions, and social classes.The result indicates that although the absolute level of HSR tariff is low, China is generally in the middle/the lowest and unbalanced position among the sample countries on HSR affordability in terms of expensiveness and economic equity. When we considered the differentiated tariff policy implemented in Europe and Japan, the affordability gap between China and the other countries is further enlarged. Moreover, inequitable distribution of HSR affordability between different income groups and social classes are found larger not only within China, but also higher when compared to the other sample countries.Finally, we conclude that China should implement differentiated HSR pricing system at a larger scale and greater extent based on the Ramsey pricing and Yield management principle to grasp the additional revenue from the high level income group/the developed region and alleviate the economic equity as well. Meanwhile, we also suggest the balance between HSR affordability for passengers themselves and the macro financial affordability for the country as a whole should also be considered in the future HSR pricing regime formulation.     

高铁时代的城市经济增长路径与效益机制研究

本文基于综合的分析框架,探讨高铁对城市经济增长的影响及内在机制,并在不同规模城市之间进行比较;使用列车数作为城市高铁建设与运营水平的指标具体考察两种连接方式的不同影响,结合随机森林方法和样本划分进行了机制验证。结果显示,高铁的城市经济效益主要是一种间接影响,作用路径的不同解释了高铁对不同规模城市影响程度的差异性;随着城市规模的扩大,高铁在提高服务业生产效率和促进产业升级方面作用显著,而对于规模较小的城市,高铁的影响主要在于加速产业结构调整;从连接方式看,外向型交通网络的发展能够从多个方面提升大城市的经济绩效,而与邻近城市联系的加强对于中、小城市的发展显示出了积极的影响。     

Policy impacts on the propensity to travel by HSR in the Amsterdam – London market

This paper investigates the impacts of possible measures to enhance HSR market share in the London-Amsterdam market. To this aim, we adopted a two-level aggregate nested logit model able to jointly model trip distribution and trip generation, thus taking into account that the tested policies may increase or decrease the overall demand. The model was applied to an extensive dataset about passenger flows traveling between London airports and HSR station and Amsterdam in the period 2015–2019. The results show that both the reduction of HSR fares and the application of an air ticket tax, albeit with different impacts in terms of stimulus or reduction effect on overall demand, are ineffective in increasing HSR market share, if not adequately supported by improving HSR service. Increasing HSR frequency and reducing HSR travel times constitute the best opportunities to increase HSR ridership by stimulating a higher substitution effect than modifications in relative fares. Lastly, the recent queueing at airports, following staff shortages and strikes, significantly lower air transport demand and potentially has a substantial upward effect on HSR market share.     

Inter-metropolitan regional migration galvanized by high-speed rail: A simulation analysis of the Linear Chuo Shinkansen line in Japan

The development of transportation infrastructure impacts migration, production, and other economic activities along with it. In this study, we conducted a multiregional computable general equilibrium simulation analysis to assess the effects that the proposed 2027 high-speed railway, the Linear Chuo Shinkansen in Japan, will have on population migration. The 47 prefectures ordained by the Japanese administrative unit were considered, and the simulation potential workforce population was taken as 110 million. The population is concentrated in the Tokyo metropolitan area. As per our simulation, once the proposed high-speed railway opens, “travel costs” (comprising time and the monetary costs of traveling) will decrease. This situation will stimulate economic activities and lead people to migrate to the prefectures where the economic environment improves. The results show that this development will ease extreme population concentration while simultaneously increasing employment and production values. However, additional analysis indicates that further development of the Linear Shinkansen to strengthen the current high-speed rail on the route to Tokaido will increase population concentration.     

Impact of high-speed railway on urban resilience in China: Does urban innovation matter?

Based on calculating the urban resilience index from five aspects of economy, society, institutions, infrastructure, and ecology by adopting the entropy method, this study applies the time-varying DID model to systematically examine HSR's impact on China's urban resilience, on basis of which its heterogeneities and the mediating effect of urban innovation are also quantified. The findings reveal that: (1) HSR can significantly promote China's urban resilience, as supported by various robustness tests. (2) HSR can significantly improve economic and institution resilience of cities, but does not play a significant role on social resilience and infrastructure resilience, and has a negative effect on ecological resilience. (3) The driving effects of HSR on the resilience of core cities, large cities, and non-resource-based cities are more significant. (4) Urban innovation is an important channel through which HSR impacts urban resilience. The conclusions of this study can offer useful insights for China's future HSR planning and resilient cities construction.     

REGIONAL DEVELOPMENT IN CHINA: INTERREGIONAL TRANSPORTATION INFRASTRUCTURE AND REGIONAL COMPARATIVE ADVANTAGE

Significant economic disparities among China's Eastern, Central, and Western regions pose unequivocal challenges to social equality and political stability in the country. A major impediment to economic development, especially in the poor, remote Western region, is the shortage of a transportation infrastructure. The Chinese government has committed to substantial investment for improving the accessibility of this vast, land-locked region as a mechanism for promoting its development. The paper examines the impacts of the intended transportation infrastructure build-up on the Western region's comparative advantage and its interregional trade. The World Trade Model is extended to represent this investment and applied to determine interregional trade in China based on region-specific technologies, factor endowments and prices, and consumption patterns as well as the capacities and costs of carrying goods among regions using the interregional transportation infrastructure in place in the base year of 1997 and that planned for 2010 and 2020. The model is implemented for three regions, 27 sectors, and seven factors. The results indicate that the planned infrastructure build-up will be cost-effective, will increase benefits especially for the Western region, and that it can conserve energy overall at given levels of demand but substitute oil for coal. Based on these and other model results, some recommendations are offered about strategies for regional development in China.     

Socioeconomic Impacts of high-speed rail: A bibliometric analysis

High-speed rail (HSR), as an efficient and environmentally sustainable mode of transportation mode, has received increasing attention in many countries over the past decades. While the literature on HSR's technology development and the assessment of the socioeconomic impact of the system has increased substantially in recent years, it remains unclear how the understanding of the socioeconomic impact system has evolved, and what the characteristics of various research focuses are. The objective of this study is to provide a comprehensive examination of the evolution of the high-speed rail literature, with a focus on socioeconomic impact analysis. Specifically, the following research questions are addressed: what is the global trend of scientific publication on the socioeconomic impact analysis of HSR? What specific focuses are uncovered from this trend? And what are the future directions of research in this field? A thorough understanding of the literature helps scholars better identify the research gaps, needs and directions for future research endeavors. In addition, it may also facilitate the decision-making for future investment in HSR through a better understanding of the potential impacts of the system.     

The impact of executive diversity on corporate innovation: Evidence from the natural experiment of high‐speed rail in China

We examine the impact of executive diversity on corporate innovation using an exogenous natural experiment: the implementation of high‐speed rail (HSR) in China. The findings suggest that after a city implements HSR, firms increase their executive diversity, resulting in better corporate innovation than firms in non‐HSR cities. Additional analysis suggests that when a firm belongs to a competitive industry, is located in a low marketization region, or operates in a poor transportation region, the impact of HSR on executive diversity and corporate innovation is magnified. Our findings carry implications for other emerging markets.     

上海公园空间可达性与公平性分析

公园是城市绿色基础设施的重要组成部分,是城市居民游憩活动的重要场所,具有重要的生态、娱乐、休憩和社会文化等功能.在遥感和地理信息系统技术的支持下,以上海市为例,运用最小邻近距离分析方法时研究区公园的空间可达性进行了定量评价,并结合上海市第五次人口普查数据资料,采用需求指数,分析了研究区各街道居民对城市公园的需求情况,在此基础上,采用定序变量相关分析和因子空间叠置分析两种方法定量测度了研究区公园布局的空间公平性程度.研究结果表明:(1)研究区可达性水平总体上较高,超过半数的居住区出行不足1000 m即可到达一个公园,超过70%的街道可达性水平较好;(2)在街道水平上研究区公园空间布局总体上比较公平、较为合理,可这性水平与需求指数呈显著相关,很高或高需求的街道70%左右均具有很好或好的可达性.     

Aligning organisational interests in designing rail-wagon tracking

The paper investigates the design and implementation of rail-wagon tracking to align the interests of rail-track owners, rail operators and third-party logistics service providers. The investigation identifies design actions to enable beneficial uses for the different rail-wagon tracking participants in a railway logistics system. Design science is used as the overall research approach. The findings are derived in the context of three organisations involved in an automotive railway logistics system. Data on the perceptions and interests of the parties is collected using the case-study methodology. Our findings indicate how rail-wagon tracking can be used to improve the efficiency of rail transport operators’ maintenance operations and potentially decrease wear and tear on rail tracks owned by the government authority. These anticipated benefits have motivated the transport authority in the case setting to make investments in more intelligent infrastructure, providing a platform for future material-flow tracking by logistics companies.     

Impact of high-speed rail on urban economic development: An observation from the Beijing-Guangzhou line based on night-time light images

The high-speed rail (HSR) of China has developed and expanded rapidly and made great achievements in the past twenty years. The ongoing HSR plan is expected to have a significant impact on the urban economy and spatial structure in China. However, relevant data-driven research is still lacking. Traditional data collection approaches such as field surveys are costly to assure the accuracy of materials. In this study, a new remote sensing perspective of night-time light (NTL) was adopted to observe the long-term impact of the HSR on cities along the rail. More specifically, we investigated the impact of the Beijing–Guangzhou High-Speed Railway (BGHSR) on urban economic development by using night-time light data from 2002 to 2018. Such a line connects the capital (located in the north of China) and southern China and lies on the most important geographic axis of the country. Our results find that the construction of BGHSR line has a considerable positive impact on economies of first-tier cities (e.g., Beijing and Guangzhou) and new-first-tier cities (e.g., Zhengzhou, Wuhan, and Changsha), but also hurt some second-tier and third-tier cities such as Baoding and Handan. Generally, the spatial economic pattern of cities along the BGHSR line has been rapidly reshaped with the change of the transportation system. Each city needs to reconsider its role and value in the coming regionalization process to adapt to the national strategy.     

Do high-speed railways accelerate urban land expansion in China? A study based on the multi-stage difference-in-differences model

High-speed railway (HSR) have become the main transportation mode in China and a crucial contributing factor for the formation and development of urban and regional spatial structure. This study aims to investigate the effects and mechanisms of HSR on urban land expansion in China. The multi-stage difference-in-differences (DID) estimation method is used to explore the cases of 35 mega cities. The main results are presented as follows. 1) Opening HSR can positively influence urban land expansion, as evidenced by the 9.5% increase in the urban land expansion index after such opening. 2) The increase in the number of HSR station and route can accelerate urban land expansion. Each newly added station increases the urban land expansion index by 2.4%, and urban land expansion increases 4.8% when a new HSR route is added. 3) The positive effects of the opening of HSR on urban land expansion generally have a time lag of five years. 4) Compared with cities in the east, the midwestern ones are more vulnerable to the impact of HSR. The net effect of HSR on urban land expansion for midwestern cities is 10.9% higher than that for cities in the east. Furthermore, the mechanisms of the effect of HSR on urban land expansion are the industrial agglomeration effect of HSR and the incentive effect of local governments’ land finance alongside the development of HSR.     

Does high-speed railway promote urban innovation? Evidence from China

Empirical discussion in the existing literature on the relationship between transportation infrastructure and innovation remains limited. As one of the most important transport infrastructures, China's high-speed railway (HSR) has greatly compressed the space-time distance and strengthened the linkages between cities, which may contribute to innovation activities. Using the panel data of 285 Chinese prefecture-level and above cities and employing the difference-in-differences (DID) model, this paper examines the impact of HSR opening and HSR service intensity on the urban innovation. Propensity score matching (PSM) together with DID (PSM-DID) method is utilized to address the potential estimation biases. The empirical results demonstrate that HSR has significantly improved the level of urban innovation. Heterogeneity analysis finds that the promotion effects of HSR on innovation are more remarkable in peripheral and small cities. Moreover, the effects of HSR on cities far away from the central and large cities are with higher significance and greater magnitude than cities close to central and large cities. For cities near central and large cities, the service intensity of HSR is more likely to improve their innovation level. In addition, we further find that service industries and private enterprises benefit more from the effect of HSR in promoting innovation. This study can provide robust evidence for the effect of HSR on promoting urban innovation, as well as policy enlightenment for innovation growth and sustainable economic development.     

Does the opening of high-speed rail enhance urban entrepreneurial activity? Evidence from China

Entrepreneurship plays a critical role in contributing to the realization of full employment in all countries around the world. By improving the efficiency of the flow of production factors, high-speed rail (HSR) has an important impact on regional economic development. However, little is known about whether HSR has improved urban entrepreneurial activity. This paper takes the opening of HSR as a quasi-natural experiment and constructs a difference-in-differences (DID) model, using panel data on 284 prefecture-level cities in China for the period from 2005 to 2019, to systematically evaluate the impact of HSR openings on urban entrepreneurial activity. We find that the opening of HSR has increased the urban entrepreneurial activity, and that this effect is more obvious in cities at high administrative levels, with locational advantages, and highly developed economies, including service industries. HSR can enhance urban entrepreneurial activity by improving the level of talent aggregation and venture capital. These findings provide fresh perspectives on the connection between HSR and urban entrepreneurial activity.     

基于FUZZY综合评判理论的城市轨道交通社会效益评价

文章在我国大中城市大力发展城市轨道交通的背景下,中的综合评判理论对城市轨道交通修建的效果评价问题进行了分析,法的可行性。分析城市轨道交通社会效益的基础上．运用模糊决策理论采用一级综合评判模型,进行例证分析,证明了该评判方     

城市轨道交通次生环境影响评价指标体系建构

城市轨道交通项目的建设给城市的经济环境、社会环境和自然环境带来极大的次生环境影响,因此有必要对城市轨道交通次生环境影响进行切合实际的综合评价.在总结城市轨道交通次生环境影响评价基本特点的基础上,构建了城市轨道交通次生环境影响评价指标体系,给出了各个评价指标的量化方法和评价标准,从多个方面论证了城市轨道交通的正面效益更多地体现在其对城市的次生环境影响中.这一结论的得出为建立和完善城市轨道交通次生环境影响评价理论,正确进行城市轨道交通项目投资决策奠定了的基础.     

High-speed rail network and urban agglomeration economies: Research from the perspective of urban network externalities

High-speed rail (HSR) has greatly promoted cross-regional economic activities, but few studies have been conducted from the perspective of urban network externalities (UNEs). Based on data from China from 2008 to 2019, this paper constructs an HSR operation network model to study the impact of the network position (NP) on urban agglomeration economies (UAEs) by jointly employing network and econometric analysis methods. The findings suggest the following: (1) Improvements to NP significantly enhance UAEs. Improving the comprehensive NP by 1% will increase urban output per capita by 193.5–226.8 RMB. The findings hold under several robustness tests. (2) The NP's facilitation of growth in UAEs is reflected mainly in national core cities, while the impact of peripheral cities reflects a “∽-shaped” curve as their distance from each nearest neighboring core city changes. (3) From the temporal-dynamic perspective, the NP's impact on UAEs appeared one year before the HSR line was opened and was fully realized three years after the opening of the HSR. (4) Investment agglomeration and expansions in borrowed size are the main mediating mechanisms whereby NP facilitates UAEs.     

城市基础设施可持续发展水平的组合评价

基于"驱动力—状态—响应"模型,构建了城市基础设施可持续发展水平评价指标体系。运用因子分析、主成分分析、熵值法、灰色评价和集对分析构成的方法集对全国31个省市的基础设施可持续发展水平进行了综合评价。通过Kendall-W协和系数法对各评价结果进行事前一致性检验,在保证各方法评价结果具有一致性的前提下,运用算术平均组合评价模型、Borda组合评价模型和Copeland组合评价模型对方法集中单一方法的评价结果进行组合评价,最后采用Spearman等级相关系数进行组合评价方法的事后检验,选出最优的组合评价方法,得到全国31个省市的最终排名并对此进行了聚类分析。     

远程教育在教育公正进程中的作用探究

教育公正是社会公正的重要内容,是社会公正在教育领域的延伸和体现,也是实现社会公正的重要手段和途径。推进教育公正,对于构建和谐社会具有重要意义。在发展中国家,可以从基础设施建设、资源建设和质量保证等方面入手推进远程教育的发展,促进教育公正的实现。