Rethinking the Transport Infrastructure-Led Development Model

Weidong Liu,Wei Xiong

doi:10.3390/su14010407

Abstract

Transport infrastructure-led development has been well recognized, especially in regard to China’s achievement, which has led to a growing range of programs and initiatives. However, some failures have subsequently raised debates over the effectiveness of such a development model, but existing studies have not yet given satisfactory explanations. This paper aims to provide an effective interpretation from the perspective of sustainable transport infrastructure by rethinking the transport infrastructure-led development model. According to our study, researchers have paid more attention to the development benefits of transport infrastructure and the mechanism, while constraints of different financing sources and patterns on the sustainability of transport infrastructure have been neglected, though financing patterns have drawn much attention. In this paper, we argue that the degree of constraints from financing patterns greatly impact the achievement of development benefits, in which the trade-off between cash-back and long-term benefits is essential for achieving the sustainability of transport infrastructure.

Highlights

While many existing studies have argued for the transport infrastructure-led development model from a long-term perspective and some development practices have provided evidence for such a model, many transport infrastructure projects failed to sustain and deliver greater development benefits due to the constrains put by financing patterns or poor financial performance
One must figure out how to ensure cash-back in the short term from the perspective of attaining long-term development benefits and how to make the transport infrastructure project evolve into real economic development
By introducing the analytical framework on sustainable transport infrastructure with attention on the constraints of financing patterns, this paper has tried to combine the binary perspectives on the transport infrastructure-led development model

Summary

Introduction

In many areas of infrastructures and in many countries, there is a tradition of “user pays”, which creates various ways of private participation in infrastructure development based largely on the market mechanism but with government subsidies, e.g., the popular public–private-partnership (PPP) model [13] This indicates that the financing sources and structures of infrastructure development are becoming more and more diversified. From the standpoint of economic geographers, the sustainability of transport infrastructure is a precondition for subsequent development, and it requires sophisticated interactive processes between financing patterns and development benefits to be achieved. This paper attempts to reveal the precondition for the transport infrastructureled development model by focusing on the sustainability of transport infrastructure itself, i.e., to understand what kind of development benefits can be achieved under different degrees of financing constraints.

Literature Review and Theoretical Framework

Financing

Dynamics of Financing Pattern Constraints and Development Benefit Responses

Findings

Conclusions and Discussion