The Impact of China’s High-speed Rail Overseas Investment on Economic Growth of the Belt and Road Countries

Formally proposed in 2009, China's high-speed rail ‘go global’ was effectively promoted in 2013 with the proposal of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), which expanded China's high-speed rail overseas investment to a global scale. Studying the impact of China's high-speed rail (HSR) investment overseas is of great significance for the continuous promotion of BRI. Based on the panel data of 46 countries along the Belt and Road from 2006 to 2021, the difference-in-difference method (DID) is used to evaluate the impact of China's HSR overseas investment on the economic growth of corresponding countries. Besides, heterogeneity analysis in terms of region is carried out in this paper. The empirical results show that, first, China's overseas investment in HSR promotes the economic growth of the countries along the Belt and Road, and this conclusion is confirmed by the parallel trend test. Second, compared with other regions, China's HSR investment has a more obvious positive effect on the economic growth of Asian countries.