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Transportation and Regional Economic Development: Analysis of Spatial Spillovers in China Provincial Regions

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Abstract

The role of spillover effect of transportation endowment on regional economic development is analyzed in this paper. We adopt the reduced form from the Solow growth model to estimate spillover effect from transportation. The panel database in use incorporates provincial gross regional product (GRP), labor and capital supply, and transportation investment information from 1985 to 2012 in China. The results confirm positive and significant spillover effect in Chinese provinces. In this paper, non-homogeneous spillover effects are captured in the empirical regression by the use of spatial weighing methods based on provincial economics and similarity as well as geographic connection. Highly positive spillovers are observed between economically similar provinces. However, for those under-developed provinces, high network connectivity often results in low or negative spillovers. The mobility and migration of production factors are believed to be the sources of the negative spillovers, while the industrial reallocation and market expansion contribute to the positive spillovers.

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Acknowledgments

This research is financially supported by Center of Cooperative Innovation for Beijing Metropolitan Transportation with Grant T14H100041 for Dr. Chunfu Shao. The opinions in this paper do not necessarily reflect the official views of the sponsor. They assume no liability for the content or use of this paper. The authors are solely responsible for all statements in this paper. The authors are grateful to the two anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments and suggestions.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Traffic and Transportation, Beijing Jiaotong University, Beijing, China

    Xiushan Jiang & Ruijun Wang

  2. Department of Civil Engineering, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA

    Lei Zhang

  3. University of Maryland, 1173 Glenn L Martin Hall, College Park, MD, 20742, USA

    Chenfeng Xiong

Authors
  1. Xiushan Jiang
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  2. Lei Zhang
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  3. Chenfeng Xiong
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  4. Ruijun Wang
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Chenfeng Xiong.

Appendix

Appendix

Table 3 Provincial-level estimation results
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Jiang, X., Zhang, L., Xiong, C. et al. Transportation and Regional Economic Development: Analysis of Spatial Spillovers in China Provincial Regions. Netw Spat Econ 16, 769–790 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11067-015-9298-2

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