Better roads improve regional economies: evidence from Turkey
Paving dirt roads and building highway networks have unsurprisingly been shown to produce substantial economic gains, but what is the impact on domestic trade from improving existing road networks? Using spatially disaggregated data on major capacity upgrades of existing road networks and domestic transactions in Turkey, this column, originally published at VoxEU, estimates a large positive impact of reduced travel times on trade and regional employment, and long-run aggregate real income gains of 2-3%.