| With the "eight horizontal and eight vertical" high-speed railway network as the goal,the flourishing development of HSR in China is still continuing.As a new form of transport infrastructure,HSR will have a significant impact on economic development and people’s productive lives.The urban-rural gap is a prominent issue that still exists in China’s development,and whether HSR,a transportation effort widely believed to influence economic development,will also cause changes in the income gap between urban and rural residents has become a hotspot of academic research.Based on this,this paper will go into the impact of the opening of the HSR on the urban-rural income gap and issue an adequate analysis of the economic impact from the HSR.This paper firstly introduces the relevant theories and analyses the mechanism of the impact of HSR on income disparity;secondly,we innovatively measure the actual accessibility of cities by weighted average travel time considering train frequency,and analyze the changes of urban accessibility caused by HSR development in Zhejiang Province according to the measurement results;then,we use the DID model to verify whether the opening of HSR can affect the income gap between urban and rural residents in Zhejiang Province,and the heterogeneity analysis is next presented which carried out from three perspectives: city accessibility level,the number of HSR lines,and the proportion of county-level administrative services,followed by robustness analysis;Finally,we propose some targeted suggestions based on the empirical results.The main findings of this paper are as follows:(1)The opening of HSR and the increase in train frequency significantly improve the actual accessibility of cities in Zhejiang Province,but it also exacerbates the non-equity of urban accessibility because of the various HSR lines,stations,and train frequency.(2)The opening of HSR widens the income gap between urban and rural residents in the 10 prefecture-level cities of Zhejiang Province as a whole,of which the promotion in urban accessibility caused by the change in train frequency plays a mediating role.The higher the level of accessibility of a prefecture-level city,the more HSR lines there are,and the more county-level administrative regions there are with HSR stations,the more obvious the impact of HSR on the widening of the income gap.(3)The new urbanization and rural revitalization strategies have contributed to narrowing the income gap between urban and rural residents,and it is found that labor mobility and the urbanization process play a masking effect in the widening effect of HSR on the income gap,i.e.labor mobility and the urbanization process can essentially cause the contraction of the income gap.(4)The impact of HSR has an early effect,from the time when the construction of HSR starts,HSR will play a role in reducing the income gap between rural residents and urban residents. |
