European highway networks, transportation costs, and regional income

Augustin Ignatov

Regional Science and Urban Economics, 2024, vol. 104, issue C

Abstract: To what extent do highways increase income in the European Union? To answer the question, this paper uses detailed data on the expansion of highways in Europe between 1990 and 2020 combined with time-invariant data on more than 2.3 million roads and 1400 ferry connections. I construct a new network database of highways, roads and ferries depicting a 31-year evolution of the lowest travel times along 51 000 region-to-region routes. To tackle endogeneity, I use non-local highway improvements as a source of exogenous variation. Reduced-form estimations suggest that, through decreasing transportation costs, highways increase aggregate regional income and economic cohesion. The study determines that transportation infrastructure policies can generate substantial economic benefits and reduce income disparities between poor and rich European regions.

Keywords: Infrastructure; Travel-times; market potential; regional economic growth; European income cohesion (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0166046223001047
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

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:eee:regeco:v:104:y:2024:i:c:s0166046223001047

DOI: 10.1016/j.regsciurbeco.2023.103969

Access Statistics for this article

Regional Science and Urban Economics is currently edited by D.P McMillen and Y. Zenou

More articles in Regional Science and Urban Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().