On the Regional Incidence of Public Investment in Highways in the USA

No 70, Working Papers from Department of Economics, College of William and Mary

Abstract: The objective of this paper is to investigate the economic and fiscal impact of road infrastructure investment in Portugal, focusing on the effects for each administrative region of both local investments and investments in other regions. We estimate VAR models for the national economy as well as for each of the five regions and using the associated impulse-response functions we find that investment in road infrastructures has been a powerful instrument to increase private investment, to create new permanent jobs and to promote long-term growth in all regions. More importantly, investment in road infrastructure, both at the aggregate level and for each one of the five regions, generates fiscal effects that largely exceed the initial investment itself. Accordingly, there is no trade-off in the long-term between the potentially positive economic effects and the potentially negative budgetary effects of such investments, i.e., both economic and budgetary effects are positive. As a corollary, policies that would reduce current road investment as a response to the current budgetary concerns will result in lower long-term growth as well as worse budgetary conditions in the future.

Keywords: public investment; road transportation infrastructures; regional spillovers; Portugal (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C32 H54 R53 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 36 pages
Date: 2008-01-14, Revised 2010-09-15
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-geo and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cwm:wpaper:70

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