High-speed railway and urban sectoral employment in China

Abstract This paper estimates the effects of the High-Speed Railway (HSR) on urban sectoral employment using China’s city-level data from 2003 to 2015. I found that cities connected to the HSR network experienced a significant growth in the employment of the retail/wholesale and hotel/food industries, while no measurable effects were found in other sectors. In order to explore whether the HSR effects are a growth or reorganization, this paper compared the effects of the HSR on the connected cities to those on adjacent cities, and found that the HSR promoted growth in the cities it directly passed through by drawing activities away from their neighbors. The further market potential approach suggests that the more people connected to the city within one to four commuting hours through the High-Speed Railway network, the higher the employment growth will be in the related sectors.

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