Networked Transport and Economic Growth: Does High-Speed Rail Narrow the Gap between Cities in China?

The construction of China’s high-speed rail has been arousing controversy for the possibility of exacerbating regional imbalance. This paper provides an empirical analysis based on the panel data of 276 prefecture-level cities during 2007–2018 to explore the authenticity of this inference. The panel threshold model is adopted to investigate whether the economic growth becomes stronger and more equal among China’s cities under the impact of the rapidly expanding high-speed rail network by taking per capita gross domestic product (pGDP) as the threshold variable. To fully explore the dynamic function, we incorporate three progressive indices to measure the role of cities in China’s high-speed rail network: the existence of high-speed rail, the number of lines, and the betweenness centrality of the city in the entire network. The result shows that high-speed rail can promote economic growth and that there is a threshold effect in this process. Specifically, cities with higher pGDP can benefit more from high-speed rail. Another significant conclusion can be drawn that high-speed rail can intensify regional disparities, yet the marginal economic gap tends to decline as the high-speed rail network gets more optimized. Meanwhile, this study recognized nine circle-like high-speed rail urban agglomerations based on empirical results, reflecting the polycentric developing pattern of China.