Transport Accessibility and Poverty Alleviation in Guizhou Province of China: Spatiotemporal Pattern and Impact Analysis

Abstract

Both transport development and poverty alleviation are vital for sustainable development. However, due to the lack of long-term, comparable, county-level transport accessibility and poverty incidence data, the spatiotemporal patterns of these factors have rarely been accurately revealed in the poverty-stricken regions of China, causing the impacts of transport accessibility on poverty alleviation to be difficult to quantify. Taking Guizhou Province in China as the study area, this study revealed the spatiotemporal patterns of transport accessibility and poverty alleviation in 88 counties from 2000 to 2018 based on multisource data, including nighttime light data, LandScan population data, and transport network data. It was found that the transport accessibility decreased from 4.9 h to 3.3 h, and the poverty index decreased from 0.75 to 0.29 on average. All these factors exhibited a “core–periphery” spatial pattern. Furthermore, the panel data regression analysis suggested that transport accessibility has played a dominant role in poverty alleviation, with an elasticity coefficient of 0.839. In the future, policies concerned to integrate transport development with rural industries such as agriculture, e-commence, and tourism are recommended for poverty alleviation and rural revitalization, which are especially significant for promoting sustainable development, securing a win–win of economic growth and social equity.