The Influence Of Expressway Accessibility On Enterprise Total Factor Productivity

The sound transportation infrastructure makes the rapid development of production factors between regions,promotes the coordinated development of the region,optimizes the allocation of production factors,and becomes the basic condition and important force for economic development.The investment in transportation infrastructure has made it possible for the Chinese economy to develop rapidly in the past 40 years.The perfect transportation network has driven the growth of related demand and played an important role in several economic crises.Therefore,the impact of transportation infrastructure on the process of economic development has become a hot issue in recent years.Most of the previous research is based on provincial-level data,focusing on the impact of transportation infrastructure on the macro economy.Based on microenterprise data and county-level data,this paper measures the accessibility by the straight-line distance from the company to the nearest highway entrance and exit,and studies the impact of highway accessibility on the total factor productivity(TFP)of industrial enterprises.In view of the large terrain fluctuation,it may lead to large deviation between the linear distance and the actual distance measured by GIS.This paper selects Hebei industrial enterprises with flat terrain,few rivers and many industrial enterprises as the research object,based on Hebei Province in 2005.By 2013,industrial enterprise data and highway data,study the impact of highway accessibility on the total factor productivity of enterprises.At the micro level,this paper regards the opening of a new expressway as a quasi-natural experiment.From the dynamic perspective,the impact of highway accessibility improvement on the total factor productivity of enterprises after the opening of a new expressway is studied.In the research method,the double effect method(DID)and the combination of propensity score matching(PSM)and DID are used to estimate the net effect of “policy treatment” of highway opening.The DID estimation shows that there are significant differences between the control group enterprises of the random sampling matching and the characteristic variables of the processing group enterprises,resulting in a large difference in the estimation results.Further,in order to solve the sample selection bias,this paper uses the kernel-matched PSM-DID for estimation,and uses a pair of four-neighbor neighbors in the caliper to perform the robustness test.The estimation results show that the highway accessibility is improved after the new highway is opened.The total factor productivity did not have a significant impact,and the first year to the eighth year after the accessibility improved.The reason why the highway accessibility is estimated from the micro level has no significant impact on the enterprise TFP.The author believes that the reason may be that,first,the expressway has obvious network attributes and spatial spillover effects,and most of the enterprises whose estimated distance is shortened in this paper are Local enterprises along the expressway;second,the geographical scale of the research object is small,which may lead to a large space spillover effect,while the direct effect is small;third,the highway network has been perfected during the study period,and the promotion effect is reduced;The shortening of the distance from the company to the nearest expressway is generally low.Finally,the author conducts a robust test of the results from the following three perspectives: one is to consider the regional choice of the control group,the second is to consider the impact of the degree of distance shortening,and the third is to estimate the countylevel enterprises with a large proportion in the total sample.The estimated result is robust.At the county level,based on the data of 142 counties(municipal districts)in the plains of Hebei Province,the regional correlation is taken into account,and the spatial measurement method is used to estimate the impact of expressway accessibility on the total factor productivity of enterprises,and the total effect is decomposed into Direct and indirect effects.The estimation results show that highway accessibility has a significant positive effect on the total factor productivity of enterprises.Expressway construction can not only significantly improve the total factor productivity of enterprises in the local area,but also promote the enterprises in the neighboring areas through network effects.The increase in factor productivity,and the direct effect on enterprises in the region only accounted for 21.45% of the total effect,and the spatial spillover effect on neighboring regions accounted for 78.55% of the total effect.This also proves to some extent the robustness of the PSM-DID estimation results from a microscopic perspective.