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Abstract
The development of high-speed rail (HSR) has been constantly encouraged and supported due to its arising importance and potential contributions to regional growth and development. Concerning the link between HSR and regional development, the existing research mostly focuses on the general qualitative insights and restricted quantitative analysis on specific aspects of interest. Rather few researchers have focused on exploring the impacts induced by HSR quantitatively and analyzed the relationship between HSR and regional development holistically. This paper reviews the existing research ranging from the impacts of general transport infrastructures to HSR, in particular, with focus specifically on the applicability of the methods and models. It then proposes a conceptual model, which is able to combine the different aspects of regional development and jointly evaluate the overall impacts of HSR at the regional level. At last, to explore preliminarily the applicability of the conceptual model, a case study has been added to the paper, which analyses the impact of Portuguese freeway construction to the municipal development in the 1990s using structural equation modeling (SEM) approach.
This research was developed in the framework of the EXPRESS Research Project (MIT/SET/0023/2009) sponsored by the Portuguese national research funds through FCT/MCTES (PIDDAC) and co-financed by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) under the Operational Agenda for Competitiveness Factors - COMPETE. The comments of four anonymous referees, to whom we are grateful, helped to improve this paper substantially.