China's dazzling transport-infrastructure growth: Measurement and effects

We document an unprecedented change in the size and the quality of China's transport-infrastructure network between 2000 and 2013 based on hand-collected and digitized data on roads and railways. The changes are summarized and portrayed as shortest-possible transport times of people and goods between 330 prefectures of mainland China. A quantitative model of China's prefectures and a Rest of the World, featuring both goods trade and migration, suggests that the transport-infrastructure changes induced regional convergence of lagging-behind prefectures in terms of population density and, to a lesser extent, of real per-capita income. Not only changes in highway and high-speed-railway networks but also ones in lower-level road and railway networks are quantitatively important.