This paper establishes a general equilibrium trade model and adopt the “market access” approach to measure the impact of the high-speed railway (HSR) network on the economic growth of 110 of the main prefecture-level cities of the People’s Republic of China, for which we manually collect the pairwise travel distances and railway speeds to calculate market access. The empirical results show that the launch of the HSR exerts significant positive effects on growth. Specifically, a 1% increase in market access leads to an increase in real income of 0.123% (controlling the region fixed effect) or 0.121% (controlling the province fixed effect).
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