On the road to prosperity ? The economic geography of China's national expressway network

Over the past two decades, China has embarked on an ambitious program of expressway network expansion. By facilitating market integration, this program aims both to promote efficiency at the national level and to contribute to the catch-up of lagging inland regions with prosperous Eastern ones. This paper evaluates the aggregate and spatial economic impacts of China's newly constructed National Expressway Network, focussing, in particular, on its short-run impacts. To achieve this aim, the authors adopt a counterfactual approach based on the estimation and simulation of a structural"new economic geography"model. Overall, they find that aggregate Chinese real income was approximately 6 percent higher than it would have been in 2007 had the expressway network not been built. Although there is considerable heterogeneity in the results, the authors do not find evidence of a significant reduction in disparities across prefectural level regions or of a reduction in urban-rural disparities. If anything, the expressway network appears to have reinforced existing patterns of spatial inequality, although, over time, these will likely be reduced by enhanced migration.Transport Economics Policy&Planning,Economic Theory&Research,Labor Policies,Roads&Highways,Regional Economic Development

Iteration Methods for Linear Systems with Positive Definite Matrix

Two classical first order iteration methods, Richardson iteration and HSS iteration for linear systems with positive definite matrix, are demonstrated. Theoretical analyses and computational results show that the HSS iteration has the advantages of fast convergence speed, high computation efficiency, and without requirement of symmetry

Distributed entanglement induced by dissipative bosonic media

We describe a scheme with analytic result that allows to generate steady-state entanglement for two atoms over a dissipative bosonic medium. The resonant coupling between the mediating bosonic mode and cavity modes produces three collective atomic decay channels. This dissipative dynamics, together with the unitary process induced by classical microwave fields, drives the two atoms to the symmetric or asymmetric entangled steady state conditional upon the choice of the phases of the microwave fields. The effects on the steady-state entanglement of off-resonance mediating bosonic modes are analyzed. The entanglement can be obtained with high fidelity regardless of the initial state and there is a linear relation in the scaling of the fidelity with the cooperativity parameter. The fidelity is insensitive to the fluctuation of the Rabi frequencies of the classical driving fields.Comment: to appear in Europhysics Letter