Public infrastructure investment, especially transportation investment is always seen as aneffective way to boost economy. A lot of studies have found that positive relationship existsbetween transportation investment and economic growth. However, the magnitude of this impactstays in doubt. Based on analysis at different geographical level and with different modelingmethods, the magnitude of the effect varies from around 0.5 to 0. Most of the existing researcheslook at this problem from an economic perspective, and several issues that are critical fortransportation problems are neglected. This paper tried to solve the economic problem from atransportation perspective, and mainly addressed three issues: using physical measurement ofhighway infrastructure instead of financial measurement to avoid bias caused by price variance,inclusion of qualitative indicators besides quantitative indicators to represent the relationshipbetween transportation infrastructure and economic growth more comprehensively, endogeneityof travel demand and transportation investment are considered simultaneously during theanalysis. The results confirmed the existence of induced demand and induced supply.Transportation investment has a positive impact on economic growth. However, the effect isrelatively small, with the short-run and long-run elasticity to be 0.018 and 0.028 respectively.
展开▼
