Market Access, Population Mobility and Regional Disparity:Evidence from China's High-Speed Railway

Abstract

Large-scale transport infrastructure investments can reduce travel costs between cities, compress the spatial-temporal distances, and increase the range of options for firm location and labor employment. This paper exploits China’s High-speed railway as a large-scale natural experiment to investigate the impact of travel cost reduction on population mobility and spatial disparity. The estimation results suggest that the network has a positive effect on population flow and agglomeration. In general, it promotes population agglomeration in counties along the route, but there are significant differences across regions. In particular, the launch of HSR can facilitate population flows from the west to the east and from the north to the south. In terms of county hierarchy, HSR can promote the population inflow to counties in small and medium-sized cities in the east and reduces the inflow to counties in large cities whereas the opposite occurs in the central region. Additional estimation results present further qualitative evidence in support of a mechanism based on changes in market access.

Keywords: Market access, High-speed railway, Population mobility, Regional disparity