On the road: Access to transportation infrastructure and economic growth in China

By Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo, Nancy Qian. Journal of Development Economics, 2012

1,120 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper estimates the effect of access to transportation networks on regional economic outcomes in China over a twenty-period of rapid income growth. It addresses the problem of the endogenous placement of networks by exploiting the fact that these networks tend to connect historical cities. Our results show that proximity to transportation networks have a moderate positive causal effect on per capita GDP levels across sectors, but no effect on per capita GDP growth. We provide a simple theoretical framework with empirically testable predictions to interpret our results. We argue that our results are consistent with factor mobility playing an important role in determining the economic benefits of infrastructure development.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Political Science and International Relations

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/496c75ba1d0336b57043e117017b5bcf3bf354e6

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Citations in the corpus

The Development Effects of the Extractive Colonial Economy: The Dutch Cultivation System in Java (2019, positive): “More generally, various evidence points to the benefits of infrastructure construction (Donaldson and Hornbeck, 2016; Banerjee et al., 2012; Michaels, 2008; Baum-Snow, 2007; Fogel, 1964) and agglomeration (see Glaeser and Gottlieb (2009) for a review).”
The Average and Heterogeneous Effects of Transportation Investments: Evidence from Sub-Saharan Africa 1960–2010 (2020, result): “5This suggests that roads contributed to the decentralization of economic activity in our context, in line with some work (Redding and Sturm, 2008; Banerjee et al., 2012; Rothenberg, 2013), but less so with recent papers on China (Faber, 2014; Baum-Snow et al., 2017b). 6This is consistent with Ricar”
Do rural roads create pathways out of poverty? Evidence from India (2018, background): “Finally, it is worth reiterating the argument made by Banerjee et al. (2012) in the context of their study of railroads in China. They argue that a lack of labor mobility in China resulted in the gains from the railroad to stay localized. India is similarly known for low levels of labor mobility (se”
Road infrastructure development and economic growth (2019, background): “Nevertheless, several scientific evidence showed that the growth of road infrastructure has no significant impact on economic growth [11-12].”
Rural Roads and Local Economic Development (2018, background): “Results on growth have proven somewhat mixed: there is evidence that reducing transportation costs can increase (Ghani et al., 2015; Storeygard, 2016), decrease (Faber, 2014) or leave unchanged (Banerjee et al., 2012) growth rates in local economic activity.”
New road infrastructure: The effects on firms (2019, methodology): “…García-Lopez et al., 2015 ); (b) using hysical geography as an instrument, assuming that physical geography s unrelated to current conditions ( Banerjee et al., 2012; Faber, 2014; edwab and Moradi, 2016 ); or (c) assuming that some places are inciental beneficiaries of new links, e.g. places…”
High-speed railways and collaborative innovation (2021, background): “Western countries provided much of the financing and had substantial influence over the placement of railways, and their objectives were to promote western economic and military interests in China (Banerjee et al., 2020).”
Spatial Autocorrelation Panel Regression: Agricultural Production and Transport Connectivity (2017, methodology): “This is a typical empirical challenge in the infrastructure-growth literature (e.g., Donaldson 2010; Banerjee et al. 2012; Datta 2012; Jedwab and Moradi 2012).”