Infrastructure and regional growth in the European Union**The authors are grateful to the editors of the special issue and to the anonymous referees for their stimulating suggestions to an earlier version of this paper. The financial support of the European Research Council under the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007–2013)/ERC grant agreement no 269868 and of a Leverhulme Trust Major Research Fellowship is gratefully acknowledged. The research is also part of the Prociudad†CM programme and of the UK Spatial Economics Research Centre. The usual disclaimer applies

Transport infrastructure has represented one of the cornerstones of development and cohesion strategies in the European Union (EU) and elsewhere in the world. However, despite the considerable funds devoted to it, its impact remains controversial. This paper revisits the question of to what extent transport infrastructure endowment – proxied by regional motorways – has contributed to regional growth in the EU between 1990 and 2004. It analyses infrastructure in relationship to other factors which may condition economic growth, such as innovation, migration, and the local ‘social filter’, taking also into account the geographical component of intervention in transport infrastructure and innovation. The results of the two†way fixed†effect (static) and difference GMM (dynamic) panel data regressions indicate that infrastructure endowment is a relatively poor predictor of economic growth and that regional growth in the EU results from a combination of an adequate ‘social filter’, good innovation capacity, both in the region and in neighbouring areas, and a region's capacity to attract migrants. The meagre returns of infrastructure endowment on economic growth raise interesting questions about the opportunity costs of further infrastructure investments across most of Western Europe.