Transport infrastructure and the decentralization of cities in the people’s Republic of China

Abstract

It is widely believed that transport infrastructure has important impacts on the development of cities. Until recently, however, there has been little systematic evidence with which to evaluate claims about the effects of transport infrastructure on the development of cities and regions. In this paper, we describe the evolution of transport infrastructure in the People’s Republic of China and how it relates to the evolution of location patterns of population and production in Chinese cities and their surrounding regions. We summarize empirical evidence from Baum-Snow et al. (2017) on the causal effects of various types of transport infrastructure on the decentralization of cities in the People’s Republic of China. Finally, we put our results in the context of the existing literature on the effects of infrastructure on productivity and the allocation of resources across locations.