Abstract: The report of the 19th CPC National Congress pointed out that high-quality development required properly handling the relationship between balanced and unbalanced regional development. At present, the key to narrowing the gap among regions lies in the balanced layout of transportation infrastructure and human capital. High-speed railway, human capital and regional economic gap are included in the same research framework in this research, and through the collection of panel data of 108 prefecture-level cities in the Yangtze River Economic Belt from 2005 to 2020, the index system of regional economic gap is constructed. The frequency of stopovers is adopted to quantify the developing degree of high-speed railway, and the fixed effect model is used to empirically research the influence of high-speed railway development on regional economic gap. The findings are as follows: (1) The development of high-speed railway can significantly narrow the gaps of economy, output, income and life quality in the whole region. (2) The mediating effect analysis shows that high-speed railway development can improve the level of human capital, and then affect the regional economic balance. (3) The reducing effects of high-speed railway development on different regions are different, and the effect is more obvious in the central and western regions with low economic development level. Therefore, it is of practical significance for the balanced development of the Yangtze River Economic Belt to rationally allocate China’s high-speed railway network and break down barriers to the flow of talents in combination with local government talent policies.

Key words:  frequency of high-speed railway stopovers, human capital, regional economic gap