Does the Opening of High-Speed Railway Improve High-Quality Economic Development in the Yangtze River Delta, China?

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The study of high-speed railways on high-quality economic development is an exciting topic.

More empirical research can help us to understand the logic of the impacts. First of all, it is very valuable to discuss the concept of high-quality economic developmen; addingg an angle of economic developmen for our  society  can shed light on sustainable development. As mentioned in this paper, the role of development momentum on regional growth, the alignment and station of HSR is largely determined by development potential, it will be more convinced if those factors are included in the model. Some technical reference will be helpful for the conclusion, for example the impact of service frequency, total travel time instead of on-board time by HSR. 

moderate editing 

Author Response

Please see the attachment，thank you.

 

 

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

This is an interesting paper exploring whether the opening of high-speed railway would improve high quality economic development in the Yangtze River Delta. I have the following concerns regarding the paper.

1. The high quality economic development is not a well-defined academic concept. It is something defined by the Chinese government. You cannot simply take it as given and try to work on it. The first thing you need to do is to rigorously prove or disprove whether it is a meaningful (new) concept. Unfortunately, I cannot find workable statements in your paper to help me believe this is a concept meaningfully different from sustainable development. 

2. Your paper is not written in a rigorous way, at least under the standard of peer-reviewed international journals. For example, in lines 56-58, “The new development philosophy has become a widely accepted and utilised framework for assessing the quality of economic development.” I don’t think it is a correct statement if you are talking about any meaningful work internationally. You can find this kind of statements frequently in the introduction part.

3. You cited too many papers in Chinese journals to motivate your paper in the introduction part. You are submitting your work to an international journal, so please try to make sure every potential reader be able and willing to check the reference.

4. Figure 1 is essential for your paper while it is built on very weak theoretical foundations without meaningful or solid support. Again, you cannot mainly cite papers in Chinese journals to finish your paper submitted to an international journal. If you are unable to find any widely cited papers in international journals to motivate your work, this may indicate that your work is not important at least for researchers out of your own country.

 

Based on the above four points, please rewrite your introduction and literature parts. When you are rewriting the introduction part, please make sure your research question can be clearly motivated in the first two paragraphs.

 

5. I’m not fully convinced that opening of high-speed railway is an exogenous shock. For the policy makers, they would take the economic conditions of related areas into consideration.

6. I’m not convinced that your table 1 is rigorous. You simply cited two Chinese papers. I don’t know whether these two papers are meaningful. You should cite some papers from prestigious journals since the index system is essential for your research.

7. Why you select these five control variables not others? Please provide the reasons by citing papers from international journals.

8. Your empirical design is confusing. Even if I temporarily accept the concept of high quality economic development, as you stated, it is something proposed in 2017. Then, how can you use a sample spanning from 2011 to 2019? Before 2017, probably nobody has any idea about high quality economic development. Accordingly, the index or measure you are using is to capture no meaningful thing about high quality economic development.

9. You need to do more robustness checks. For example, you need to replace your explained variables with other indexes or measures, add more control variables, and so on.

10. There are more meaningful heterogeneity analyses you can do. Please check relevant papers published in international journals.

11. After you finish revising the above parts, you must rewrite discussion and conclusion part accordingly.  

You must try to get some help from some native speakers or language editing service to make sure your presentation does not look like a direct translation from Chinese.

Author Response

Please see the attachment, thank you.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

hanks for the response—here are some more concerns based on the revised version for reference.

 

1.      There is too much to handle in one paper, the framework provide in Figure is still not clear to the interrelationship between various factors. It will be valuable if the paper focuses more on one or two factors.

2.      With heavy investment in HSR, we also need more energy and resource to maintain the large-scale network, the environmental performance of HSR is not always self-evident, contributing to green development.

3.      It should be careful of some biases in the definition of HQED discussed in the paper, for example, how about the HQED for the bottom 20% of people, education opportunity in remote area, and living cost will also be considered.

4.      Evaluation of HQED should be a multi-dimensional, the conclusions based on the weighted value of the index is not convincing.

As mentioned in the paper, the elements are interrelated and mutually reinforced, please check how the methodology adopted in the research can respond to the statement.  

Moderate editing of English language

Author Response

Please see the attachment. Thank you.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

The authors have well addressed my concerns. I think the current version is publishable.

Author Response

Thank you for giving us a lot of valuable and enlightening comments in the first-round revision, we have benefited a lot from it, and we also appreciate your recognition and encouragement of our revision, thank you very much.