ON THE ECONOMIC EFFECTS OF INVESTMENT IN RAILROAD INFRASTRUCTURES IN PORTUGAL

Alfredo Pereira and Jorge Andraz

No 96, Working Papers from Department of Economics, College of William and Mary

Abstract: The objective of this paper is to identify the effects of railroad infrastructure investment on aggregate and regional economic performance in Portugal. At the aggregate level, we show that railroad investment crowds in private investment and employment and have strong effects on output. At the regional level, we show that railroad investment affects private investment positively in all regions, employment in only Lisbon and the North, and output in all regions with the exception of Alentejo. The effects are regionally distributed in a rather uneven manner with Lisbon and the North capturing the bulk of the effects. Our results also highlight the relevance of regional spillovers. In terms of the relative effects of comparable railroad investment in the region and elsewhere in the country, we find that the North and the Center benefit more from investment elsewhere while the remaining regions benefit more from local investment. Finally, from a country-wide perspective, railroad investment located in Lisbon generates the largest marginal benefits, which reflect, mostly, the large effects in the Lisbon region itself. By contrast, railroad investment in the remaining regions has a much lower marginal benefit to the country, but these benefits reflect mostly spillovers. This highlights the difficulty in implementing policies that simultaneously maximize aggregate growth and reduce regional disparities.

Keywords: railroad infrastructure; public investment; regional spillovers (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C32 H54 R53 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 25 pages
Date: 2010-09-15, Revised 2012-04-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eur, nep-geo and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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Journal Article: ON THE ECONOMIC EFFECTS OF INVESTMENT IN RAILROAD INFRASTRUCTURES IN PORTUGAL (2012)
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