The Economic Impact Of Beijing Kowloon Railway On The Neighboring Cities

In December 19,2015,the County Development Research Institute of Shandong University issued the report of China’s county residents development index.With the help of data visualization tool,the teachers of the research group of the County Development Research Institute found that the residents’ development indexes of the counties along the Beijing Kowloon Railway were lower than that of the other counties.Therefore,this paper studies the economic impact of Beijing Kowloon Railway on its nearby non-central cities.The studies of traffic infrastructure belong to new economic geography.Related studies have found that transportation infrastructure can affect the economy by changing the transportation cost.But for non-central cities,the impact of the improvement of transportation infrastructure on the economy is complex,that is,it has a positive impact,but it also has a negative impact.In this paper,we have regarded the ninety-five prefecture-level cities(non-central cities)as our research objects.With the help of XGeocoding_v2,we get the latitude and longitude data of the areas.And then,with the help of the software of ArcGIS,we have calculated the nearest distance between every city and the railway stations and then have divided the cities into two groups,the experimental group and the control group.After that,we have taken the advantage of the method of difference-in-difference to estimate the effect of Beijing-Kowloon Railway on the nearby cities’ real GDP and per capita disposable income of urban residents.We find that the railway has significant negative effect to the nearby cities’ real GDP.So,we have further investigated the underlying reasons.We find that although the railway has increased the fixed asset investment,but decreased the government expenditure.And the negative effect is more than the positive one.In addition,the empirical results show that the construction of the Beijing Kowloon Railway has no significant influence on the per capita disposable income of the urban residents.