 Transport Costs and Rural DevelopmentStaff General Research Papers Archive from Iowa State University, Department of Economics Abstract: Innovations that reduce costs of transport from rural locations may also reduce transport costs to rural areas. As transport costs fall, producers can afford to concentrate and achieve economies of scale. This paper explains an initially negative, but ultimately positive, relationship between reductions in transport costs and rural development. A two-region general equilibrium model with firm and worker spatial mobility highlights the firm and household location implications of costly transport service use by both industry and agriculture in the context of scale economies and product differentiation. The computable general equilibrium model is initialized and verified with a bi-regional Social Accounting Matrix and then used for simulations. Changes in relative transport costs are shown to affect relative regional wage rates, thus also determining the location of 'production-cost-oriented' firms. Date: 1998-01-01 Published in Journal of Regional Science 1998, vol. 38 no. 2, pp. 293-312 There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it. Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:isu:genres:1185 Access Statistics for this paper More papers in Staff General Research Papers Archive from Iowa State University, Department of Economics Iowa State University, Dept. of Economics, 260 Heady Hall, Ames, IA 50011-1070. Contact information at EDIRC. |
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