The Role of Infrastructure in Regional Development

By how much can public investment in infrastructure spur regional development in lagging areas?

It is certainly plausible that such efforts will encourage private investment by providing important services, but there is also the danger that this will create little more than "palaces in the desert". Despite the obvious importance of the impact of regional infrastructure to policy makers, only recently has empirical work emerge that attempts to measure the impact of public investments on regional output, productivity and growth.

In this section we present the results of these efforts, as well as some discussions on the role of network versus local infrastructure on equalizing regional disparities, and a survey of multiregional models for the allocation of infrastructure.