The Machanism Research Of Transport Infrastructure On Regional Economic Growth

Due to the weak infrastructure, poor technology and other reasons, the economic development of northwest China had been lagging behind that of eastern and central regions on the whole, which led to the situation of uncoordinated regional economic development. Among these reasons, as a productive infrastructure, the transport infrastructure becomes the key factor for restricting the economic development of Northwest at present. By studying on the mechanism of transport infrastructure on regional economic growth, this paper not only helps to reveal the relationship between transport infrastructure and regional economic growth, but also to promote the construction of transport infrastructure and the growth of economy in the five northwestern provinces, as well as speeding up the coordinated regional development of China.This article firstly collected and analyzed the literature of scholars relating to the interconnectedness of transport infrastructure and economic growth, and discussed the impacts and the internal mechanism of transport infrastructure on regional economic to clear the influences and mechanism of transport infrastructure on regional economic growth, and conducted current situation description of transport infrastructure and regional economic growth for the five northwestern provinces. Based on the existing research, this paper selected four indicators to measure transport infrastructure development, including transport network density, passenger volume, cargo and cargo turnover, and selected regional GDP to measure regional economic growth, and conducted Unit root test and Cointegration test on the time series data of five northwestern provinces from 1995 to 2013, and builded the VAR model and VEC model, then used Granger causality test to study the causal relationship between them. Moreover, in order to compare and analysis the role of transport infrastructure on economic growth of the different provinces furtherly, this paper then used Hausman test and Covariance analysis test to establish a fixed-effect model with variable coefficients on the panel data of the five northwestern provinces, and analyzed the estimation results. The empirical results showed that there exsited long-term cointegration relationship between transport infrastructure and regional economic growth in the five northwestern provinces, and the economic growth can promote the development of transport infrastructure, and transport infrastructure can also stimulate the growth of economic,but there was no one-way causal relationship between them; at the same time, there were some differences in the machanism of transport infrastructure on economic growth among the northwest provinces, which may be related to the level of regional development, geography and regional policy and so on.