Effects Of High-speed Rail Opening On Urban Financial Development

With the rapid development of China’s high-speed rail industry,the economic effects of high-speed rail have gradually been valued by economics scholars.Generally,the economic effects of high-speed rail can be divided into two categories,the first category is macroeconomic effect,including effect on urban GDP,per capita GDP,etc.;the second one is microeconomic effect,including the choice of corporate entities and individual behavior.This paper mainly studies the effects of the opening of the high-speed rail on financial development.From a macro perspective,there are two main effects of high-speed rail opening,and macroeconomic performance is affected by these two effects.The first one is the“agglomeration effect”,meaning that the opening of the high-speed rail makes the economic development relatively backward and the resources of cities with slow development speed are concentrated in central cities.This effect will lead to the rapid development of central cities and the decline of peripheral cities.The second effect is the “diffusion effect”,meaning that the opening of the high-speed rail makes the development achievements of central cities spread to marginal cities,thereby stimulating the development of marginal cities.This effect will promote the development of marginal cities from another way.According to present papers,most of them focus on “agglomeration effect”,while little of them study the “diffusion effect”.Therefore,this article explores the effects of high-speed rail opening on urban financial development based on the study “agglomeration effect”.The influencing factors on financial development can be classified into two economic factors and non-economic factors.Although the research on the relationship between economy and finance is endless,the conclusions are relatively unified—the relations are mutually promotion.The research on non-economic factors(such as politics,culture,education,etc.)is relatively inadequate.Thus,this paper makes up for lack of research on the latter to a certain extent by exploring the impact of transportation infrastructure construction of non-economic factors on the development of urban financialThis paper takes 285 prefecture-level cities from 2007-2017 in China as the research object,and explores the effects of high-speed rail opening on urban financial development.Based on this research,the differences of the effects of the high-speed rail opening on the financial development of cities in different situations are studied.Therefore,relevant conclusions are drawn: the opening of high-speed rail has a significant positive promotion effect on urban financial development,and this promotion effect shows heterogeneity among cities with different levels of transportation development,different development speed and different size.To be specific,the effects of high-speed rail opening on big cities and cities of faster economic development is more significant than that of small cities and cities of slower economic development.In general,the contributions of this paper are mainly focused on the following points: firstly,to provide another feasible way for promoting regional financial development by complementing the influencing factors of financial development and building a bridge between the level of regional transportation construction and financial development;secondly,this paper systematically organizes the macro data of China’s prefecture-level cities which provides a consequential reference for future research;thirdly,the conclusions of this paper provide a significant theoretical support for relevant policies of local governments.