Estimating Wider Economic Impacts of Transport Infrastructure Investment: Evidence from Accessibility Disparity in Hong Kong

Abstract

This paper estimates wider economic impacts related to productivity from transport networks in Hong Kong in 2016. Specifically, we use an instrumental variable approach to identify the causal effect of transport network centralities on productivity measured by gross value added. Our identification strategy largely relies on the exogenous variations from historical planned and existing transport networks. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper that makes use of complex network science indicators of accessibility combining urban rail, road network, and pedestrian network in capturing wider economic impacts. Our results confirm that pedestrian and rail networks can statistically significantly increase productivity in Hong Kong while roads play a less significant but still meaningful role. The research suggests a key planning policy implication: place-based policies in a dense city require a combination of local and global transport accessibility improvement which facilitates both agglomeration and decentralization.