Impact Of High-speed Railway Opening On Urban-rural Income Gap At County Level

Since the reform and opening up,China’s economy has developed rapidly,its overall national strength has been increasing,people’s living standards have improved,and remarkable achievements have been made in China’s economic construction.At the same time,we began to take advantage of the advantages of location and transportation to promote the development and growth of local enterprises.However,we should also be aware of the problems behind development.China’s uneven level of economic development is reflected in the fact that there is a considerable gap between regions and between urban and rural areas.These problems,which cannot be ignored,not only hamper China’s high-quality economic development structurally,but also constitute,to varying degrees,one of the factors of social unrest.At present,the uneven level of economic development in various regions has led to widespread inequalities in income distribution among the population,leading to an excessive gap between rich and poor in some areas.Therefore,reducing the income gap between urban and rural areas has become a major practical problem facing economic development.Only by reducing the income gap and keeping it within a reasonable range can we enhance people’s sense of participation,access and happiness,eliminate the destabilizing factors of economic and social development,and move our country steadily towards a socialist modern powerhouse.With the improvement of science and technology,railway as an efficient and convenient means of transportation has gradually entered the homes of ordinary people.In recent years,China’s high-speed railway has gained rapid development.The construction of high-speed railway has greatly saved people’s travel time.Meanwhile,the income level of China’s residents has also been significantly improved.The rapid development of high-speed rail in China has brought new opportunities and new ideas for solving the income gap between urban and rural areas.In this paper,we studied the impact of high-speed rail on China’s urban and rural income gap from the perspective of opening up to the outside world.At present,there are few researches on the impact of high-speed railway opening on the income gap between urban and rural residents,so it is necessary to carry out further research in this field.This paper uses theoretical and empirical analysis to investigate the impact of the high-speed rail opening on the income gap between urban and rural residents.Using a sample of 896 counties in 128 counties(cities and districts)between 2013 and 2019,the paper evaluates the impact of high-speed rail on the income gap between urban and rural residents and its mechanism.At the same time,considering the great differences among the regions,different indicators are introduced as control variables for comparative analysis to reflect the situation of each region and county more accurately.Further heterogeneity analysis for counties with different population sizes continues to be conducted using county data from2013-2019.Then,the robustness of the baseline regressive results was tested by using a sample with a lag period and a replacement variable.Finally,the mechanism of income disparity between urban and rural residents was further analyzed,and the conclusion and policy recommendations were made that high-speed rail significantly reduced the income gap between urban and rural residents.This article refers to the previous research,through adopting the method of fixed effect,carried on the empirical analysis to 128 county-level city data,examines the high-speed rail to the economy influence,takes the high-speed rail as the starting point,in a certain extent,enriched the transportation infrastructure economy effect research content.At the same time,the implementation effect of high-speed railway is also examined from the time angle,which makes up for the deficiency of the previous scholars’ attention to this field.In the future,more and more in-depth research can be carried out based on a broader and more comprehensive sample of cities.