Measuring Economic Impacts of the Tokai-Hokuriku Expressway with an Attitude Survey of Enterprises

Abstract

This paper pays attention to problems of measuring regional economic impacts of opening an expressway with an attitude survey of enterprises. Tokai-Hokuriku Expressway is a national expressway linking Aichi and Gifu Prefectures to Toyama Prefecture. On July 5, 2008, the last section between Hida-Kiyomi and Shirakawa-go (a famous World Heritage Site) officially opened. This paper examines business factors and regional factors expected by enterprise managers in six prefectures (Gifu, Aichi, Shizuoka, Fukui, Ishikawa and Toyama Prefectures), and develops a consciousness structure model for the effect of opening the expressway by factor analysis and covariance structural analysis. The results of the analyses are summarized as follows. First, factor analysis showed that measuring economic impacts of opening the Tokai-Hokuriku Expressway with an attitude survey of enterprises isolated two factors that explain the “effects on regional economy” and “effects on enterprises”. Second, we estimated the subconscious structural model of the enterprises in the six prefectures. Three concepts, “effects on regional economy”, “effects on enterprise” and “effects on regional employment” were estimated in the model from several measured variables that were predicted to be latent variables. Third, we measured the economic impacts of opening the Tokai-Hokuriku Expressway on each prefecture by a covariance structural analysis. The effects on regional economy impacted Gifu and Toyama Prefectures, and the effects on enterprises impacted Ishikawa and Fukui Prefectures. The level of the effects on regional economy and enterprises of each prefecture fluctuate if the interchange is contiguous to the area.JEL Classification: R11, R12