Aggregate and Regional Economic Effects of New Railway Infrastructure

Abstract

Economists expect positive returns to investments in infrastructure. However a project with higher national returns might have less favorable effects on a regional level than the alternative. Therefore new infrastructure should also be assessed on a regional level, but econom(etr)ic evalua tion models are scarce, especially in regional science. This paper proposes new approaches to evaluate infrastructure by a dynamic spatial economet ric model that allows long-term predictions. We investigate the regional effects for 2 Austrian railway projects and show that infrastructure returns are positive on an aggregate and at a regional level but spatial variation can be large.Regional growth convergence, traffic accessibility, infrastructure evaluation, spatial econometrics