Abstract
This paper aims to investigate the impact of high-speed rail (HSR) construction on urban innovation disparity and the role of internet development in this relationship. Using prefecture-level panel data spanning 2008–2020 in China and a difference-in-differences approach, we find that being connected to HSR networks significantly promotes urban innovation, which widens the innovation gap between HSR and non-HSR cities and leads to urban innovation disparity. We further find that internet development increases HSR cities’ innovation and hence results in a higher level of urban innovation disparity. Heterogeneity analyses reveal that HSR construction in cities with higher GDP, cities closer to the national central cities, cities in the south, and cities on the coast brings about greater innovation performance because of the higher level of internet development, which widens the urban innovation gap in different regions. We show that population migration and capital investment are two dominant channels through which HSR and internet development induce urban innovation disparity. Our findings extend previous works on the impact of HSR on regional innovation and provide deeper evidence of how HSR and the internet shape regional economic distribution.
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Notes
The Qinshen passenger line, which was the first HSR line in China, was opened in 2003 with a design speed of 250 km/h, but no new HSR lines were built from 2003 to 2008, Therefore, 2008 should be regarded as the first year of the new era of high-speed rail in China.
The data come from http://news.gaotie.cn.
Since Train Schedule Books are updated only until 2016, the robustness test excludes data from 2017 to 2020.
Because some of the cities have more than one HSR station, the number of HSR stops within the city on one train are not double counted.
The China City Statistical Yearbook does not release data of households accessing broadband internet in 2020, which come from the CEInet statistical database.
The total population is measured in 10,000 people; the number of households accessing broadband internet is measured in 10,000 households. Because we cannot obtain the information of the number of households accessing broadband internet at the individual level, this is the best way to calculate the internet penetration rate.
See http://www.cnrds.com. The CNRDS database also provides information about the number of utility model patent applications and design patent applications. As these two types of patent applications cannot reflect the true innovation capacity in a given region, we do not use them in this paper.
The best way to calculate the urban rate is to use the number of urban residents divided by the total number of residents in the same city; however, we cannot obtain the exact data of the number of urban residents from the China City Statistical Yearbooks from 2017 onward. Hence, we use this alternative measure.
Because the data of expenditure on science and technology in the whole city is reported only after 2010, we use urban-ward-related data to calculate this variable.
A detailed description can be found in Table 1.
Although the coefficient of HSR is significantly negative in Columns (4)–(6), the interaction term coefficient of HSR and the internet is significantly positive. The overall impact of high-speed rail on urban innovation is still significantly positive. Taking Column (6) as an example and considering the mean value of internet (0.210 in Table 1), the total impact of high-speed railway opening on urban innovation is 0.159.
The alternative measurements of internet (telecom revenue per capita) is available for 2008–2019, so this robustness test only extends to 2019.
These four metro cities are Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen, as previously mentioned.
The data of highway passenger volume could be obtained from the China City Statistical Yearbooks directly, and the data of the openness of airports at the prefectural level are collected and calculated from http://www.caac.gov.cn/XXGK/XXGK/TJSJ/index_1216.html, which has provided a National Airport Production Statistical Bulletin every year since 2006 and contains the airport openness information for each year.
Xu and Nakajima (2017) tested the relationship between HSR and industrial development and found that HSR would promote the development of heavy industry but not that of light industry, and heavy industry never carries out many innovation activities.
The latest census data (Seventh National Census) showed that the three northeastern provinces (Heilongjiang, Jilin, and Liaoning) saw their share of the population drop by 1.2 percent, indicating that the outflow of population is much higher than the inflow.
The southern region includes Jiangsu, Anhui, Zhejiang, Hubei, Hunan, Jiangxi, Fujian, Yunnan, Guizhou, Sichuan, Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, Guangdong, and Hainan, and the northern region includes Heilongjiang, Jilin, Liaoning, Hebei, Shandong, Henan, Shanxi, Shaanxi, Inner Mongolia, Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, Gansu, and Qinghai.
The reasonableness of coastal and inland areas at the provincial level lies in that although some cities within coastal provinces are not located on coastlines, there are more resource flows and commodity trade in such provinces, and the intra- and interprovince economic development characteristics and economic structure are similar.
The advantage of CHIP2013 is that it contains migration, rural and urban samples, which can accurately define population migration. At the same time, it contains the information of the region (city and county) where the individual is investigated, which can effectively realize the docking with the data of prefecture-level cities (Yang and Deng 2017).
CHIP2013 provides detailed information about the place of current hukou registration: within the community/village committee, out of the community/village committee and within the street/township, out of the street/township and within the district/county, out of the district/county and within the city, out of the city and within the province, and out of the province. We set the migration dummy to 1 if the interviewee chooses out of the city, within the province and out of the province.
The reason for using these data is that there are relatively few policy restrictions (like the hukou policy) on the mobility of Chinese university teachers, and university teachers can move more freely between different cities according to urban characteristics and the research environment and are less sensitive to transportation price and pursue more travel efficiency. Therefore, the opening of high-speed rail has a relatively larger impact on this group.
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Xu, X., Zheng, M. High-speed rail construction and urban innovation disparity in China: the role of internet development. Econ Change Restruct 56, 3567–3599 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10644-023-09542-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10644-023-09542-4