Page 400 - 360.revista de Alta Velocidad - Nº 5

Zhenhua Chen

upgrade of existing infrastructures. As illustrated in Figure 4, rail capital investment has
experienced a substantial growth since 2007 and reached a peak in 2010, which was then
followed by a decline. The investment was dominated in regions such as the Yellow River
MidReaches and the Yangtze River Mid-Reaches. The capital investment in rail infrastructure
is expected to generate a different regional economic impacts primarily in a short-run
through a boost in capital factor input to the economic system. From a modeling perspective,
the detailed capital investment data in different fields and regions will be converted into
a percent change in K for their corresponding sectors, which will then be used to estimate
the indirect economic impacts through CGE simulation.

Source: The Compilation of Railway Statistics, 2003-2014
Figure 4. Rail Infrastructure Investment by Regions in China: 2002-2013

• C. Rail Transportation Cost

Transportation cost change is considered as the third key drivers to measure the economic
impacts of rail infrastructure improvements. A reduction of transportation cost as a result
of infrastructure system development is expected to improve economic efficiency and
facilitate the expansion of final demand and supply, which then may lead to a growth of
the economy. However, the measurement of the generalized cost can be very challenging as
it involves both monetary costs and time costs (Button, 2010). Since most of the data are
not available, following Chen et al. (2016), we use the technological speed as a proxy to
measure the change of rail transportation cost.

398 360.revista de alta velocidad