Impact of regional accessibility on urban residents' income in China: A bidirectional-fixed panel model

Yahong Liu; Daisheng Tang; Fengyu Wang; Naila Bano

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0289866

Impact of regional accessibility on urban residents' income in China: A bidirectional-fixed panel model

PLoS One. 2023 Oct 30;18(10):e0289866. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0289866. eCollection 2023.

Authors

Yahong Liu¹, Daisheng Tang², Fengyu Wang¹, Naila Bano¹

Affiliations

¹ Business School, Xuzhou University of Technology, Xuzhou, China.
² School of Economics and Management, Beijing Jiaotong University, Beijing, China.

Abstract

The income gap between regions and its expansion are the main manifestations of the imbalanced and inadequate economic development in China. High-speed railway (HSR) construction is regarded as an important method to drive domestic demand, drive the pulse of the economy, and promote the coordinated development of regions. Based on the opening of HSR and the acceleration of ordinary railways, we used the weighted average travel time model and accessibility coefficient to estimate the changes on accessibility in 286 cities at prefecture-level and above from 2000 to 2018. Then, the influence mechanisms of improving regional accessibility on urban residents' income were estimated by using the bidirectional-fixed effects panel model and the recursive model respectively. We found that: (1) The accessibility of urban areas has been greatly improved due to the opening of HSR and the acceleration of ordinary railway, among which the improvement of HSR cities is greater. (2) The improvement of regional accessibility significantly promoted the income growth of urban residents, and the increase of the regional accessibility coefficient by 1 unit led to an average increase of 2140 yuan in the per capita disposable income of urban residents. (3) There is regional heterogeneity in the impact of improving regional accessibility on urban residents' income, and it has a significant effect on the eastern and northeastern regions. It has a greater positive effect on improving the income of residents in central cities compared with peripheral cities. (4) Regional accessibility can promote urban income growth through regional employment and fixed asset investment. In the future, the transportation network should be further improved to facilitate the regional economic cycle, strengthen the coordination and complementarity of regional economies, and promote regional economic integration so as to promote the improvement of resident income level and the common prosperity of the people.

Copyright: © 2023 Liu et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Publication types

Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

China
Cities
Economic Development
Humans
Income*
Urban Population
Urbanization*

Grants and funding

This work was supported by grants from Social Science Foundation of Jiangsu Province [Grant No. 23EYC024]; and General Project of Philosophy and Social Science Research in Colleges and Universities of Jiangsu Province [Grant No. 2023SJYB1138]. This work was supported by the excellent teaching team of e-commerce major "Qinglan Project" in Jiangsu Province. The funder was not involved in the study design, collection, analysis, interpretation of data, the writing of this article or the decision to submit it for publication.