Government quality and the economic returns of transport infrastructure investment in European regions

By R. Crescenzi, M. Cataldo, A. Rodríguez‐Pose. 2015

233 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Transport infrastructure investment is a cornerstone of growth-promoting strategies. However, in the case of Europe the relevant literature is increasingly failing to find a clear link between infrastructure investment and economic performance. This may be a consequence of overlooking the role of government institutions. This paper assesses the connection between regional quality of government and the returns of different types of road infrastructure in EU regions during the period between 1995 and 2009. The results unveil a strong influence of regional quality of government on the economic returns of transport infrastructure. In weak institutional contexts, investments in motorways – the preferred option by local governments – yield significantly lower returns than the more humble but possibly more efficient secondary road. Government institutions also affect the returns of transport maintenance investment.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Political Science and International Relations

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5fd6ed878f6f7b8dedf617ccc8560e42e0ea3513

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Citations in the corpus

The influence of the local context on the implementation and impact of EU Cohesion Policy (2019, background): “Rodríguez-Pose and Garcilazo (2015) and Crescenzi et al. (2016) reach similar conclusions in empirical studies focused on specific CP areas of intervention.”
Regional inequality in Europe: evidence, theory and policy implications (2019, unknown): “…local governments, limits in voice and accountability as well as corruption – steer public investment towards projects with dubious economic and/or social returns (Crescenzi et al., 2016) and have heavily shaped the location of multinationals’ productive capital in the EU (Ascani et al., 2016).”
Institutional change and the development of lagging regions in Europe (2019, background): “Therefore, while investments aimed at improving physical accessibility may play an important role in the early stages of implementation of a development strategy in the most lagging regions of Europe, the returns of such investments are bound to become less evident – and in many cases represent a wa”
Quality of government and regional resilience in the European Union. Evidence from the Great Recession (2019, background): “This is consistent with the approach adopted in earlier studies on the determinants of regional performance in Europe during the Great Recession (e.g. Groot et al., 2011; Crescenzi et al., 2016; Giannakis and Bruggeman, 2017).”