Transport accessibility and economic growth: Implications for sustainable transport infrastructure investments

Abstract

This research reaffirms a sustainable transport investment should go forward in a way that enforces consistent economic growth while maintaining environmental benefit. Society’s economic input-output relations reinvest the time saved by the transport system, of which benefit appeared as the income level’s rise. This research empirically proves that the recursive profit is possible when the infrastructure aligns accessibility enhancement with industries’ productivities. Specifically, we found that the interactions between industries and accessibilities make synergy when the industries maintain appropriate productivity. Under the same context, the measure for the socially vulnerable should start at capacity building even given transport, based on which we can build economically equitable accessibility. This research takes environmental sustainability granted as long as the incumbent Korean infrastructure investment principle exists without empirical analysis. A comparative analysis using structural equation models proved the existence of the synergy due to the accessibility-industry interactions. Besides, we captured the quantities of the synergy through groups of partial cross-sectional correlations. Authors conclude that government authority needs to pursue the best synergy between transport plan and economic development strategy, and prepare a capacity building for the socially vulnerable furthermore.