Railroads of the Raj: Estimating the Impact of Transportation Infrastructure / Dave Donaldson.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Donaldson, Dave.

Contributor:

National Bureau of Economic Research.

Series:

Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) no. w16487.

NBER working paper series no. w16487

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource: illustrations (black and white);

Other Title:

Railroads of the Raj

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2010.

Summary:

How large are the benefits of transportation infrastructure projects, and what explains these benefits? To shed new light on these questions, this paper uses archival data from colonial India to investigate the impact of India's vast railroad network. Guided by four predictions from a general equilibrium trade model, I find that railroads: (1) decreased trade costs and interregional price gaps; (2) increased interregional and international trade; (3) increased real income levels; and (4), that a sufficient statistic for the effect of railroads on welfare in the model (an effect that is purely due to newly exploited gains from trade) accounts for virtually all of the observed reduced-form impact of railroads on real income in the data. I find no spurious effects from over 40,000 km of lines that were approved but - for four different reasons - were never built.

Notes:

Print version record

October 2010.