High-Speed Rail, Regional Economics, and Urban Development in China
Traditional economic evaluations of major transport infrastructure investments focus on the direct costs and benefits arising from travel, including user time savings, operator cost savings, and reductions in externalities including air pollution,...
| Main Authors: | , , , |
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| Format: | Brief |
| Language: | English en_US |
| Published: |
World Bank, Beijing
2016
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/663511468220788389/High-speed-rail-regional-economics-and-urban-development-in-China http://hdl.handle.net/10986/25484 |
| Summary: | Traditional economic evaluations of
major transport infrastructure investments focus on the
direct costs and benefits arising from travel, including
user time savings, operator cost savings, and reductions in
externalities including air pollution, noise, and accidents.
There is an emerging consensus that major transport
investments may have significant impacts that are not well
captured by this type of conventional cost-benefit analysis.
In China, the World Bank transport team has supported both
econometric studies and on-the-ground surveys that begin to
identify and quantify these impacts in the context of
China's emerging High Speed Rail (HSR) program. Based
on this and other research, the Bank team has begun to pilot
a methodology to evaluate wider economic development
benefits for several HSR projects, and has found them to be
significant - of the same order as, but additional to the
direct transport benefits that are traditionally measured.
Crucially, these benefits of larger and better connected
markets accrue to businesses and individuals even when they
themselves do not travel. This paper highlights this
research and methodology and the policy implications related
to maximizing these benefits in practice. |
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