The Impact Of High-speed Rail Operation On The Export Trade Of The Three Provinces In Northeast China

In September 2018,General Secretary Xi Jinping visited the Three Provinces in Northeastern China and presided over a seminar to further promote the revitalization of Northeast China.He emphasized that China’s opening-up is an important window to the north and a central hub for cooperation in Northeast Asia.The construction and operation of transportation infrastructures are essential for the development of international trade in China.In particular,the rapid development of high-speed rail(HSR)in the past decade has greatly promoted China’s foreign trades.Under the background of "Eight Horizontal and Eight Vertical" in China,this paper investigates the impact of the HSR operation on the export trade of the Three Provinces in Northeast China theoretically and empirically.The structure of this paper is as follows.First,section 1 defines the concept of the HSR and sorts out related theories.Second,section 2 analyzes the development status of the HSR operation in the Three Provinces in Northeast China from four aspects:development stages,mileages,station distributions,and city coverage.On the other hand,section 3 analyzes the trade status from three aspects:the export trade volume of 34 cities in the Three Provinces in Northeast China,the annual export proportion of the cities with the operation of the HSR in total,and the export trade status between the Three Provinces in Northeast China and Northeast Asian countries.Third,section 4 analyzes the influence mechanism of the HSR operation on the export trade from the view of the variable trade cost and fixed trade cost.The study finds that the HSR reduces the variable trade cost by releasing the freight capacity of roads and civil aviation,and it also reduces the fixed trade cost by the reduction of cross-space face-to-face communication costs between manufacturers and suppliers.Finally,selecting the number of the HSR stations as the core explanatory variable,section 5 examines the impact of the HSR operation on the export trade of 34 cities in the Three Provinces in Northeast China from 1998 to 2017 through a two-way fixed effect model.The main results are as follows.First,the operation of the HSR is generally conducive to promoting the export trade of the Three Provinces in Northeast China,with an impact coefficient of 0.1263.Next,this paper uses HSR mileages to replace the number of urban HSR stations for robustness test and shows that the impact coefficient of the HSR mileage on the export trade of the Three Provinces in Northeast China is 0.0348.Then,this paper conducts a heterogeneity analysis and shows that the impact of HSR operations on the export trade in Liaoning is greater than that of Heilongjiang and Jilin.Based on theoretical and empirical analysis,this paper proposes that the central and local governments should actively use the policy advantages of revitalizing the Northeast to support the construction and operation of high-speed rail.Further,the government should improve the level of opening to promote the deepening of regional cooperation in Northeast Asia.Finally,build a sea-rail combined transportation logistics network to promote the development of export trade.