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Measuring The Long-Term Regional Economic Impacts of High-Speed Rail in China Using a Dynami

for factor inputs, the Armington elasticities, remains limited which need to be further validated
and updated. For instance, early studies have suggested that the results of CGE can be biased
unless key parameters were carefully estimated and chosen based on the specific regional
focus of assessment (Partridge and Rickman, 1998; Chen and Haynes, 2017). Hence, in order
to achieve a more accurate long-term regional economic impact assessment of the rail
infrastructure system, more endeavors are still needed in terms of both data collection and
parameter calibration.

Nevertheless, our study still has implications for infrastructure planning and policy, at least
in the following two aspects. First, a closer collaboration among different entities, such as
government, private sectors, and academic scholars, is essential to achieve a more reliable
regional economic impact assessments of large infrastructure system, such as HSR. This is
particularly important and relevant in countries like China as information is often limited to
certain agencies which as a result, regional impact assessment of HSR can be very challenging.
Second, our preliminary results imply that given that the economic impacts of the HSR systems
tend to be dissimilar among different regions, future infrastructure development and investment
plans need to be more cautiously implemented so as to a maximum benefit to the society and
the economy as well as a maximum return to investment.

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