Impacts of Transport Infrastructure on Productivity and Economic Growth: Recent Advances and Research Challenges

Taotao Deng

Transport Reviews, 2013, vol. 33, issue 6, 686-699

Abstract: The paper provides an update of the survey focusing on estimating the contribution of transport infrastructure to productivity and economic growth. The central questions addressed are possible reasons behind the conflicting results reported in the literature on the elasticity of economic output with respect to transport infrastructure investment. After providing a systematic review of recent empirical studies on the effects of transport infrastructure on productivity and economic growth, the paper notes that controversial results can be attributed to ten causes (grouped into three categories for distinguishing): (1) related to different contexts: research period, geographical scales, and country's capability in enabling economic development; (2) related to different phenomena that are being measured: different economic sectors, different types of transport infrastructure, and different quality levels of transport infrastructure; and (3) related to distinct ways of measuring a similar phenomenon: measures used to describe the dependent variable and explanatory variable, functional specification, and estimation method of the econometric model. Strong network externalities of transport infrastructure may result in nonlinearity of the relationship between transport infrastructure and economic growth. Moreover, the absence of spatial concerns in infrastructure's impacts is another important source of inconclusive results. Finally, building on recent literature, the paper has discussed policy implications and identified several research avenues for further research.

Date: 2013
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (50)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/01441647.2013.851745 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:transr:v:33:y:2013:i:6:p:686-699

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/TTRV20

DOI: 10.1080/01441647.2013.851745

Access Statistics for this article

Transport Reviews is currently edited by Professor David Banister and Moshe Givoni

More articles in Transport Reviews from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().