Heterogeneous impacts of the high-speed railway network on urban–rural income disparity: Spatiotemporal evidence from Yangtze River Delta of China

The socioeconomic effects of China’s fast-growing high-speed railways (HSRs) have become a popular issue in recent decades. However, few studies have examined how HSRs alleviate the urban–rural income disparity temporally and spatially; the current research addresses this gap in the literature from novel network accessibility and connectivity perspectives. Using different spatiotemporal models to analyze the Yangtze River Delta in China, the main findings are as follows: (1) there is evidence that the HSR network alleviates the urban–rural income disparity and exhibits a stronger positive impact on rural residents’ income; (2) compared with HSR accessibility, HSR connectivity affects the income disparity in a more significant manner; (3) due to its advantage in capturing the spatiotemporal heterogeneities of HSR’s impact, the geographically and temporally weighted regression (GTWR) model demonstrates a higher accuracy than other models; (4) the GTWR model results show that the HSR network affects the income disparity both negatively and insignificantly in Northern Jiangsu or Southwestern Zhejiang, while this effect is significant in other regions; and (5) further empirical evidence indicates that this varying effect is in light of differences in tertiary industry development and economic growth. These findings provide a novel opinion of HSR’s socioeconomic effects and present useful empirical support for solving the serious urban–rural income disparity problem in China.