Transport infrastructure and services: an Asia and developing world

Abstract

Infrastructure is a fundamental factor in the development of countries and regions. Both the quality and the quantity of the infrastructure have significant effects on productivity. In particular, good transport infrastructure is essential for regional cooperation and integration, helping lagged regions catch up with the developed regions. Several Asian countries and regions have shown significant developments over the past several decades. Rapid infrastructure investments have supported that development and economic growth. However, there is evidence that development gaps between Asian countries have widened over time. Therefore, the transport infrastructure investments in Asian countries and regions merit investigation in terms of quality, quantity, benefits and costs, and benefit transfers to promote efficient and fair infrastructure investments for the future. This Special Issue of Transportation consists of five papers submitted to Transportation and two papers selected from the presentations at the 12th World Conference on Transport Research, held at Lisbon, Portugal, in 2010. The former group of papers addresses several issues of Asian transport infrastructure while the latter is not limited to Asia but is generally applicable in developing countries. The latter group of papers was presented in the conference in Topic Area H: Transport in developing countries, which deals with all the transport issues in the developing and transition countries. The shared interests in the papers relate to all modes of transport infrastructure and development and management of that process. Hong et al. investigate transport infrastructure and regional economic growth in China. China’s economy has grown rapidly in the past decade, and the divergence in the development between regions has become obvious, and of concern. They examine the effects of various types of transport infrastructures, including land, air and water, using a panel data from 1998 to 2007. The results suggest that both land transport and water transport have a significant impact on economic growth, while the effect of the air transport is weak.