The Impact Of Building High Speed Rail On Industrial Agglomeration In Central China

China’s high-speed rail transport industry has witnessed rapid development in recent years.By the end of 2019,the total length of China’s high-speed rail has reached a staggering 35,000 km,ranking first in the world.China has completed the framework construction of the "four horizontal and four vertical" passenger dedicated lines formulated in 2008,and started the construction project of the "eight horizontal and eight vertical" railway network in the new period in 2016.The strategy of rise of the central china is being implemented vigorously in central regions.As an important link between east and west,the advantage of traffic location in central regions are very outstanding,therefore the laid of high-speed lines of the central regions also got great development.Several transportation hubs are formed such as Wuhan and Zhengzhou.At the same time,more and more counties also launched high speed rail.As an industrial development model that can promote regional competitiveness and regional economic growth,industrial agglomeration is an important form of high-speed railway to promote economic growth.Therefore,the government has established multiple industrial agglomeration zones relying on high-speed railway to effectively exert the effect of high-speed railway to promote the formation of industrial agglomeration.However,inevitably,due to the siphon effect of large cities on small and medium-sized cities,it is unknown whether the small and medium-sized cities where high-speed rail has been built really get the promotion effect from high-speed rail.It is also worth thinking about what small and medium-sized cities can do if the siphon effect makes a bigger impact.Based on panel data of 505 counties(districts)from 2013 to 2017 in the central six provinces,using location entropy to measure agglomeration degrees,we construct a multiple difference-in-difference model to investigate the influence of the building of high-speed railway on the industrial agglomeration of county-level units in six provinces of central China from the perspective of secondary industry and tertiary industry and try to analyze the mechanism.It is found that the new high-speed railway restrains the growth of the agglomeration degree of the secondary industry and promotes the growth of the agglomeration degree of the tertiary industry.On average,with everything else remaining the same,the agglomeration degree of secondary industry in the counties where high-speed rail has been built has decreased by about 3.17 percentage compared with those without high-speed rail,while the agglomeration degree of tertiary industry has increased by about 2 percentage.At the same time,in order to study which kind of counties would be most affected,we make a number of heterogeneity analysis,and conclude that counties with better economic development,middle population and a larger proportion of the tertiary industry than the secondary industry will be more affected by the new high-speed rail.According to the classification of agglomeration degree,in counties with higher agglomeration degree of secondary industry,the agglomeration degree of secondary industry is more restrained,which indicates that the new high-speed rail has a greater impact on the local development of secondary industry.We also prove the existence of the siphon effect by combining per capita GDP of the counties and the secondary industry agglomeration.We come to the conclusions that siphon effect reduces the secondary industry agglomeration and the per capita GDP of the counties.And the closer to the large city the county is,the more effective the effect is.It is consistent with the anticipation of siphon effect theory.Then we study the influencing mechanism of high-speed rail from two perspectives,transportation cost and factor flow.Building of the high-speed rail can reduce the transportation cost and speed up the city between the flow of labor,resources,and knowledge to influence the industrial concentration.But the direction of the influence is uncertain.It is thought to be related to the development gap between cities,space-time distance and small and medium-sized city "glamour index"(Wang,2015).Finally,based on the conclusions of the study,we put forward some suggestions on the building of high-speed railway from the national level and the county level.