Mobility and Development, Spring 2022 : Innovations, Policies and Practices
The traditional approach to valuing the benefits of transport investments overlooks their wider economic impacts. Traditional cost-benefit analysis of road projects focuses on estimating the value of time savings that result from upgrading infrastr...
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| Format: | Report |
| Language: | English |
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Washington, DC: World Bank
2022
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| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/099656304082228337/IDU05fb516180cea7041800b46e019cb267a32d0 http://hdl.handle.net/10986/37282 |
| Summary: | The traditional approach to valuing
the benefits of transport investments overlooks their wider
economic impacts. Traditional cost-benefit analysis of road
projects focuses on estimating the value of time savings
that result from upgrading infrastructure to improve the
volume and speed of transit. While these benefits are
important and have often been enough in and of themselves to
justify significant road investments, they overlook the
fundamental ways in which transport improvements reshape
patterns of economic activity, or in a sense the value of
what is moving along any road corridor. In that sense, the
traditional approach underestimates the true economic impact
of roads. New spatial data can bring new light on the
welfare gains of transport investments for households and
firms. The increasing availability of spatial data for
infrastructure networks, and household and firm surveys has
greatly improved the way we investigate whether
infrastructure investments have an impact on prices, jobs,
consumption, or productivity. A new body of emerging
research applies these novel techniques to examine the links
between roads, complementary infrastructures, and
development extensively across many African countries. This
article will review the main findings of this new research
in a nontechnical format accessible to practitioners, making
the emerging evidence readily available to a wider audience.
The research has been sponsored by the Chief Economist’s
Office of the Infrastructure Vice Presidency of the World
Bank, in partnership with the Transport Global Practice as
well as Infrastructure (INF) and Equitable Growth, Finance
and Institutions (EFI) teams in the Africa East and West
Regions and the Office of the Director for Regional
Integration in Africa. |
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