A Study On The Impacts Of Transportation Infrastructure On Economic Openness Of Yangtze River Delta(YRD)

Regional integrated development of Yangtze River Delta is one of China’s major strategies.According to the new development pattern of "dual circulation" and the latest contents of the report of the 20 th National Congress of the Communist Party of China,regional coordinated development is an important way to promote our high-quality modernization construction.As one of the urban agglomerations or regions with the largest scale,the most developed economy,the most active market,the strongest innovation ability and the highest degree of openness in China,the development of the Yangtze River Delta plays a pivotal role in China’s internal economic cycle and the improvement of international competitiveness.Among them,transportation infrastructure has been a major construction project since the reform and opening up.It also serves as the prerequisite guarantee and material support for economic development and commodity factor flow.With the increase of infrastructure investment,transportation projects have long been the main object of national construction.At the same time,as China is opening its door wider to the outside world,it is now a major development goal to promote the construction of a high-level open economy.Therefore,the role of transportation infrastructure is no longer limited to providing convenient and efficient transportation services for the economic cycle and development within Chinese domestic regions but promoting the comprehensive improvement of opening up to the outside world and speeding up the formation of the development model and advanced industries with the international first-class level.In view of the importance of the Yangtze River Delta urban agglomeration to China’s economic development,the improvement of transport infrastructure within the region will not only enable Jiangsu,Zhejiang,Shanghai and Anhui to develop towards a more advanced mode of opening up,but also spread the positive influence on the overall opening up of the whole country.Based on the theory of New Economic Geography,Field Theory,Location Advantage Theory,Regional Economy Theory and International Trade Theory,this paper forms the corresponding influence mechanism then.The study covers 27 core cities in Jiangsu,Zhejiang,Anhui and Shanghai in the Yangtze River Delta region,and is divided into two parts based on data from various statistical yearbooks from 2005 to2020.The first part takes the Yangtze River Delta as a whole and chooses the spatial Durbin model as the basic model to analyze the impact of transportation infrastructure on economic openness.Among them,the explanatory variable is transportation infrastructure,specifically,the road density formula is used to calculate the traffic value of each city in each year;The explained variable is economic openness,and the value is calculated by weight from three dimensions of total import and export trade,foreign direct investment and international tourism income under the principal component analysis method.In order to explore the degree of spatial spillover effect,the influence effect is decomposed into direct effect,indirect effect and total effect.However,in view of the great differences in the economic system among the cities in the Yangtze River Delta,Shanghai enjoys the unique status of "central city" in the region,the analysis of the overall situation of the Yangtze River Delta fails to study its mechanism and particularity in detail.Therefore,the second part studies whether the driving effect of Shanghai,as the central city of the Yangtze River Delta region,can promote the convergence of other cities in economic openness from the perspective of convergence and divergence.Specifically,the paper conducts σ convergence,absolute βconvergence and conditional β convergence under the traffic density index of each city and Shanghai respectively.In the empirical analysis,all of them have passed the test significantly,and verified the hypothesis of this paper.The research conclusion is drawn: the improvement of transportation infrastructure in the Yangtze River Delta can significantly promote the improvement of economic openness and will produce spatial spillover effect within the region.In addition,the higher the traffic connection between cities and Shanghai,the smaller the difference in economic openness,and the convergence can eventually be formed.