Research on the Impact of Infrastructure Construction on Tourism Industry: Evidence from the “Wuhan-Guangzhou High-Speed Rail”

Abstract

The “Wuhan-Guangzhou High-Speed Rail” opened on December 26, 2009, which could be regarded as a quasi-natural experiment that improved the quality of transportation infrastructure. With the cities having the stops of “Wuhan-Guangzhou High-Speed Rail” as the treatment group, other cities in the same provinces but without any high speed railway stops as the control group, this paper constructs the panel data from 2005 to 2013 and uses Difference in Differences method to investigate the impact of the opening of “Wuhan-Guangzhou High-Speed Rail” on the tourism economy. We find that tourism revenue in cities from treatment group increased by 13.734 billion to 22.482 billion yuan, and the total number of domestic tourist arrivals increased by 12.9814 million to 16.2512 million people. The conclusion proves that the construction of transportation infrastructure promotes the tourism industry, making up for the insufficient empirical research on the development of tourism.