Local tourism effects of HSR in small cities: three synthetic control case studies

ABSTRACT

The inauguration of high-speed rail (HSR) services is often associated with renewed expectations of revitalization of local tourism activity in sparsely populated regions. However, the empirical literature on the actual ex-post effects of this transport mode is scarce. This paper contributes to this line of research by estimating the causal impact of the HSR on the number of visitors in three small cities located in low-density areas in Spain. Our results, using the synthetic control method, robustly show that the ex-post causal effects of the HSR on overnight visitors are insignificant and, if any, they seem to exert a negative influence rather than a positive contribution. This suggests that smaller cities should be very cautious about the short-run expected impacts of transport improvements, and policy makers and planners should be aware of the actual contribution of such investments in their assessment of the net social benefits of HSR projects.

KEYWORDS:

• HSR
• tourism
• local effects
• small cities

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• L92
• L83

Acknowledgements

Authors thank comments and suggestions by three anonymous referees. This study received financial support from the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities (PID2019-104319RB-I00) and from the Government of Catalonia (Secretaria d'Universitats i Recerca, 2017SGR644 and 2020 PANDE 00058). Nevertheless, all errors are ours.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Socioeconomic impacts of HSR undertakings go well beyond the accessibility-related ones and affect project assessment, as recently pointed out by Cheng and Chen (2021).

2 See Blanquart and Koning (2017) for a review of theories and evidence on the relationship between High-Speed Rail and tourism.

3 See, for example Jia et al. (2017), Chen and Haynes (2017), Wang and Duan (2018) or, more recently, Liang et al. (2020) or Li and Ma (2021). An extensive review, including some empirical estimates, can be found in Wang and Dong (2022).

4 Although it is not the only factor, the future of tourism is undoubtedly connected to transport improvements, not only from a technological point of view, but also in relation to he accessibility of hitherto unreachable destinations, as pointed out by Galvagno and Giaccone (2019), or Bastidas-Manzano et al. (2021).

5 These results were later confirmed by Albalate and Fageda (2016), Campa et al. (2016), Vázquez and Martínez (2016) and Albalate et al. (2017).