TRANSPORTATION EQUITY STUDY AND NATIONAL BALANCED DEVELOPMENT IN CHINA

摘要

National Balanced development in China is important. This study aims at introducing transportation equity factors into the evaluation process in order to promote the balanced national development. Due to the geographical and historical reasons, the economic gaps among different regions are increasing sharply. Sufficient transportation infrastructure may ensure the social welfare and the development of economy. Generally speaking, in China, the transportation infrastructure construction has lagged behind the development of national economy. Usually the central government ranks the project priorities and put forward policies to carry out these infrastructure investment projects in sequence. However, the ranking is basically based on the project evaluation, in which Cost Benefit Analysis (CBA) method is mostly employed. As a result, the more developed east region of China usually takes a priority in the allocation of policies due to its better economic environment under the traditional project evaluation process. This undoubtedly widens the gap between the west and the east and leads to an unbalanced growth of the network system. One effort made to improve this situation is to get equity issues involved into the project evaluation process, which has been widely discussed in many countries. Based on these analyses, an entropy based model is proposed to evaluate the equity issues of projects, in which compensations for disadvantaged groups and undeveloped regions are particularly made. This is used to modify the traditional CBA results, which only focus on efficiency. It is found that the priority sequence of regional projects varies if this model is used in the evaluation process instead of CBA method. It is suggested that the undeveloped provinces in the west and the middle part of China should get a priority raise from the point of view of equity and some provinces in the east part may still remain at a high rank due to their high efficiency. This effort may be expected to promote the balanced development in China.