High-speed rail's dynamic impacts on urban industrial structure upgrading and its mechanisms

High-speed rail (HSR) is a costly transportation infrastructure, and its investment can be better justified when it leads to long-term urban economic development. However, there is a lack of empirical investigations that quantify HSR's dynamic economic benefits, particularly considering the lagging effects, as well as the changing effects resulting from the continuous expansion of the HSR network. This study represents one of the initial attempts to quantify the dynamic impacts of HSR on the upgrading of urban industrial structures. It distinguishes the sources of these impacts by considering the lagging effects for individual cities and the staggered expansion of the HSR network. In addition, the industrial structure upgrading is comprehensively evaluated from the servitization of the industrial structure and the improvement of industrial labor productivity. In which, the industrial structure servitization represents the upgrading of industrial structure towards tertiary industry. Using data from 278 Chinese cities over a span of 19 years, we developed and employed an improved synthetic control method (SCM) and staggered SCM for our empirical investigations. The results indicate that HSR generally facilitates the upgrading of a city's industrial structure. However, the effects of HSR on industrial structure servitization tend to fade quickly, while the impacts on improving industrial labor productivity are more persistent. Further regional heterogeneity analyses suggest the effects of HSR on industrial servitization is more enduring in core cities, while the labor productivity-improving impacts of HSR remain consistent across different cities.