The effects to the access to transportation networks on economic performance. Evidence from mexican municipalities.
What is the effect of access to transportation networks on economic performance? This work addresses this relation by studying how access, measured as the shortest distance to the historical transportation network, has affected long run economic performance across Mexican municipalities. The effects of public infrastructure have been studied mainly using a production function approach.This study directs attention to the effect of having access to transportation infrastructure in a different sense. Using a simple model of trade and factor mobility as the theoretical framework, the relation between access and economic performance is explained by how proximity to transportation networks affects differently trade costs of connected and not connected regions, ultimately affecting gains from trade. The hypothesis is that distance to the network is negatively related with economic performance. In order to test this hypothesis, an access measure was constructed. This measure consists on the closest distance from each Mexican municipality to the network. There is a clear endogenous bias treat caused by reverse causality between economic performance and the placement of transportation infrastructure.In order to avoid this problem and following Banerjee et al. (2012), the access measure is constructed taking as reference the Mexican historical transportation network. The results show that both elasticity of total gross production per capita to distance to the network and elasticity of the
number of economic units to distance to the network are negative and significant. That is, municipalities that are closer to the transportation network display a better economic performance than those located in further places.
Autor:
José María Rodríguez Valdez
Número de revista:
34
