Transport Infrastructure and Policy Evaluation

How beneficial are transport infrastructure investments and other transport policies? This chapter develops a framework whose goal is to survey and synthesize the answers that regional and urban economists have given to this question. Emphasis is placed on theoretical results about sufficient statistics that capture approximate impacts in both distorted and undistorted economies, as well as how new advances in data collection and causal inference are poised to leverage these theoretical results and thereby modernize and extend standard templates for infrastructure and policy evaluation. The chapter concludes with discussions of optimal policy, political economy, and practical matters of infrastructure provision.