Travelers on the railway: An economic growth model of the effects of railway transportation infrastructure on consumption and sustainable economic growth

The impacts of transportation infrastructure on sustainable economic development are multifaceted. The existing literature works on the assumption that transportation infrastructure influences sustainable economic development by influencing production behavior. By observing the increasingly common phenomenon of family tourism, this paper finds that transportation infrastructure not only affects production behavior, but also directly impacts residents’ consumption behavior. Based on this, this paper constructs a growth model in which the traffic infrastructure affects both production and consumption in order to reveal the mechanism by which railway infrastructure changes residents’ consumption structures and ultimately promotes sustainable economic growth by promoting private tourism. In order to verify this theoretical proposition, this paper also constructs panel data from the provinces of China from 2008 to 2018 and conducts an empirical study. It was found that railway and railway infrastructure investments can not only directly promote sustainable economic development through the multiplier effect, but can also indirectly promote economic growth by increasing the amounts of private tourism and their proportions.