Urban Road Infrastructure Provision and Industrial Upgrading: Evidence from Chinese Cities

Abstract

Urban transport infrastructure shapes accessibility and the spatial organization of economic activity, yet its relationship with city-level industrial transformation remains insufficiently understood. This study examines the association between urban road infrastructure provision and industrial upgrading using 2446 city-year observations for 253 Chinese cities from 2011 to 2024. Road provision is measured by the natural logarithm of per capita urban road area reported by the China Stock Market & Accounting Research (CSMAR) Database, while industrial upgrading is measured by the ratio of tertiary- to secondary-industry value added. Two-way fixed-effects estimates indicate a positive but economically modest association (β = 0.1345, p = 0.034). However, the coefficient becomes statistically insignificant with province-by-year fixed effects, and the positive estimate for non-shrinking city-years is imprecise, so population shrinkage cannot be ruled out as contributing to the baseline association. Alternative measures of absolute road scale and network density are not statistically significant. The findings therefore apply most directly to road provision relative to population and do not establish a causal effect or empirically verified mechanism. They support more targeted assessments of how urban road provision aligns with structural transition and provide a basis for future research using direct measures of network performance, congestion, and accessibility.