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Does High-Speed Rail Really Promote Economic Growth? Evidence from China’s Yangtze River Delta Region

High-speed rail (HSR) has led to a transportation revolution in China. This paper uses county-level panel data of China’s Yangtze River region to investigate the effect of connecting to an HSR line on local economy. To address the issue of endogenous HSR route placement, we employ a straight-line strategy to construct potential HSR connection variables as instrumental variables of the actual HSR connection. Both the difference-in-differences and instrumental variable methods show that connecting to HSR impedes local economy, especially in peripheral regions. The impediment effect is channelled through population reallocation from peripheral to core areas and the restructuring of industries. Our results indicate that the polarization effects of HSR outweigh its dispersion effects, consistent with the new economic geography theory.