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Rail transit is widely considered an efficient and environment-friendly means to address the increasing demand for travel. In the past decades, the scale and speed of China's rail transit development has been unprecedented. By the end of 2017, a total of 165 urban rail lines including heavy rail and light rail were in operation in 34 cities in mainland China, with a total track length of 5,033 kilometers (km), and the vast majority of them were built after 2000 (China Association of Metros, 2017). At the intercity scale, China has built the largest high-speed rail (HSR) network in the world, with over 29,000 km HSR lines by the end of 2018 (Central Government of China, 2019). Efforts to develop rail transit are also observed in other cities in both developing and developed countries.

We planned this special issue in response to the rapid development of rail transit in China and beyond. In preparation for the special issue, we organized two symposiums to facilitate debates on related research topics in June 2017, including a special session on rail transit at the 11th annual conference of the International Association for China Planning (IACP) hosted by the Harbin Institute of Technology in Harbin, China, and the second Symposium on the HSR Network in China hosted by Jinan University in Guangzhou, China.

ABSTRACTIt is critical for promoting high‐quality economic development to improve green total factor productivity (GTFP). The "structural dividend" released by the optimization of economic structure and the "reform dividend" brought by market‐oriented reform are the two ways to improve GTFP. This paper empirically examines the impact of economic structural changes and marketization progress on GTFP with the spatial dynamic panel model based on the provincial data from 2001 to 2019 in China. The findings are as follows. (1) GTFP is characterized by significant spatial clustering and spatial positive correlation in China. (2) The optimization of economic structure and the improvement of marketization both have significant positive contributions to the improvement of GTFP. (3) The results of effect decomposition show that the optimization of economic structure has a long‐term effect on the increase of local GTFP, but only a short‐term effect on the surrounding areas. However, the improvement of marketization has a stable short‐term and long‐term impact on the improvement of local GTFP, while the impact on the surrounding areas is only reflected in the long‐term. The results of heterogeneity analysis indicate that the impact of economic structure optimization and market‐oriented reform on GTFP is different in different periods and regions, and the corresponding effect decomposition results are also different. Therefore, this paper suggests that it is necessary to optimize the economic structure further and promote market‐oriented reforms to release the structural dividends and reform dividends to achieve GTFP growth.

AbstractThe paper uses the hazards model to estimate how market segmentation affects firm survival and accompanied resource allocation efficiency in China based on the manufacturing firm's data in 1998–2007 from the Annual Survey of Industrial Firms, considering the time‐varying and heterogeneous effect with the dynamics and characteristics of enterprises. According to the results, although firms benefit from market segmentation in the inauguration period, the protection diminishes afterwards and eventually becomes a hazard to the firm survival. This paper also takes one step further in finding that market segmentation may distort the resource allocation by protecting low‐productivity and low‐profitability firms from exiting the market. The findings suggest that local governments should strengthen cooperation to break administrative barriers and promote regional integrated development in order to realize the benefits of the domestic super‐large‐scale market.