Social Overhead Capital Development and Geographical Concentration

Yoshibumi Aso
Additional contact information
Yoshibumi Aso: PRI

Macroeconomics Working Papers from East Asian Bureau of Economic Research

Abstract: In recent economic geography, it is emphasized that the effect of cost decreasing in transportation on agglomeration is nonlinear. It is said that the influence of traffic infrastructure investment and the change in transportation cost on urban agglomeration does not appear until the cost is below a certain amount, and that once agglomeration arises that effect would be kept with higher probability. In theoretical models such as Krugman (1991) and Fujita, Krugman and Venables (1999), multiple equilibria and path dependence are emphasized, as well as non linearity. Those models are intuitive, but it is hard to have a statistical analysis because of the non linearity. About the macroeconomic effect of social overhead capital investment, starting from the analysis by Aschauer (1985, 1989), a lot of empirical research has been done on the productivity effect of social capital. For example, we have Asako et al. (1994), Mitsui and Ohta (1995). Moreover, Roback (1982) uses the Hedonic approach to find the effect of amenity-based social overhead capital (related to waste disposal plants, or sewage facilities), followed by Mitsui and Hayashi (2001) for a Japanese case. In these Japanese studies, they are only concerned about the topic about inefficiency of the social overhead capital distribution but not about theoretical progress in urban economics. If Krugmans model is true, however, there is a possibility that rural traffic infrastructure investment for the purpose of redistribution will experience both a decline in rural areas and agglomeration into urban areas. In the following, we will examine general theory about how we should observe the effect of traffic network provision in section II. We will estimate a market potential function and an index with which the geographical concentration degree is measured, and see how the agglomeration degree has changed historically. In section II we will conduct analysis through using prefecture data and municipal data, particularly in the Kyushu district 2 .

Keywords: capital development; potential function; geographical concentration degree; Kyushu district; Japan; Public Policy; network effect (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D85 J11 J18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2008-01
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.eaber.org/node/22593 (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 301 [REDIRECT LOOP] Moved Permanently (http://www.eaber.org/node/22593 [301 Moved Permanently]--> https://www.eaber.org/node/22593 [301 Moved Permanently]--> https://www.eaber.org/node/22593 [301 Moved Permanently]--> https://www.eaber.org/node/22593 [301 Moved Permanently]--> https://www.eaber.org/node/22593 [301 Moved Permanently]--> https://www.eaber.org/node/22593 [301 Moved Permanently]--> https://www.eaber.org/node/22593 [301 Moved Permanently]--> https://www.eaber.org/node/22593)

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:eab:macroe:22593

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Macroeconomics Working Papers from East Asian Bureau of Economic Research Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Shiro Armstrong ().