Policy Implications
If high-speed rail hurts the economy, countries will not invest in it. Therefore the cities served by the bullet trains should have benefited from the high-speed rail network. Let me carry out a simple calculation for the benefit and loss of this project. I use a similar DID specification to investigate the impact of high-speed rail on the affected cities. I would say it is not an unbiased estimation since cities are definitely selected into the railway upgrade for certain reasons. So it’s just suggestive evidence. I find that being affected by the high-speed rail upgrade is not associated with higher economic growth in cities. But it seems that the affected cities tend to have higher levels of GDP after the railway upgrade. The estimated benefit is around 17-22 billion yuan in 2007. Therefore I compare the GDP loss in counties with this estimated benefit in cities. I use the average GDP in the affected counties one year before the high-speed rail, multiplied by the magnitude of the impact (5 percent GDP reduction) and the total number of affected counties (183), to reach a total GDP loss around 77 billion yuan. Since 80 cities were connected to high-speed rail, the benefit outweighs the loss if the benefit in cities is more than around 1 billion. By comparing this threshold with the estimated benefit of 17-22 billion in each city, it is very likely that the benefit is much more than the loss. Even though the high-speed rail investment seems to have overall good economic returns, policy makers should still be aware of such distributional impact to avoid the exacerbation of within region inequality. In addition to high-speed rail, policy makers may also want to be careful about other types of infrastructure, such as highways, which may generate similar distributional impacts (Faber, 2013).
Yu Qin is a PhD student at Cornell University.