National Policy for Regional Development: Historical Evidence from Appalachian Highways

Taylor Jaworski and Carl Kitchens
Additional contact information
Taylor Jaworski: University of Colorado

The Review of Economics and Statistics, 2019, vol. 101, issue 5, 777-790

Abstract: How effective are policies aimed at integrating isolated regions? We answer this question in the context of a highway system in one of the poorest regions in the United States. With construction starting in 1965, the Appalachian Development Highway System (ADHS) ultimately consisted of over 2,500 high-grade road miles. We use a simple model of interregional trade to motivate our empirical analysis, which quantifies the relationship between market access and income. We then calibrate the model to evaluate the aggregate impact of the ADHS and compare this with alternative counterfactual proposals. We find that removing the ADHS would have reduced total income by $53.7 billion in the United States, with $22 billion of the losses in Appalachian counties. Our findings highlight the potential aggregate benefits of transportation infrastructure policies and suggest that leakage outside the targeted area may be substantial.

Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (27)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/rest_a_00808 (application/pdf)
Access to PDF is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: National Policy for Regional Development: Historical Evidence from Appalachian Highways (2016)
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:tpr:restat:v:101:y:2019:i:5:p:777-790

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://mitpressjour ... rnal/?issn=0034-6535

Access Statistics for this article

The Review of Economics and Statistics is currently edited by Pierre Azoulay, Olivier Coibion, Will Dobbie, Raymond Fisman, Benjamin R. Handel, Brian A. Jacob, Kareen Rozen, Xiaoxia Shi, Tavneet Suri and Yi Xu

More articles in The Review of Economics and Statistics from MIT Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by The MIT Press ().