Evidence on the complex link between infrastructure and regional growth

Rosina Moreno (), Manuel Artís, Enrique Lopez-Bazo and Jordi Suriñach

No 19, Working Papers in Economics from Universitat de Barcelona. Espai de Recerca en Economia

Abstract: Most studies analysing the infrastructure impact on regional growth show a positive relationship between both variables. However, the public capital elasticity estimated in a Cobb-Douglas function, which is the most common specification in these works, is sometimes too big to be credible, so that the results have been partially desestimated. In the present paper, we give some new advances on the real link between public capital and productivity for the Spanish regions in the period 1964-1991. Firstly, we find out that the association for both variables is smaller when controlling for regional effects, being industry the sector which reaps the most benefits from an increase in the infrastructural dotation. Secondly, concerning to the rigidity of the Coo-Douglas function, it is surpassed by using the variable expansion method. The expanded functional form reveals both the absence of a direct effect of infrastructure and the fact that the link between infrastructure and growth depends on the level of the existing stock (threshold level) and the way infrastructure is articulated in its location relative to other factors. Finally, we analyse the importance of the spatial dimension in infrastructure impact, due to spillover effects. In this sense, the paper provides evidence of the existence of spatial autocorrelation processes that may invalidate previous results.

JEL-codes: C23 E23 H54 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 0 pages
Date: 1997
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (33)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.ere.ub.es/dtreball/E9719.rdf/at_download/file
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 500 Can't connect to www.ere.ub.es:80 (A connection attempt failed because the connected party did not properly respond after a period of time, or established connection failed because connected host has failed to respond.)

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:bar:bedcje:199719

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers in Economics from Universitat de Barcelona. Espai de Recerca en Economia Espai de Recerca en Economia, Facultat de Ciències Econòmiques. Tinent Coronel Valenzuela, Num 1-11 08034 Barcelona. Spain.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Espai de Recerca en Economia ().