Major transport infrastructure investment and regional economic development - An accessibility-based approach

Territorial cohesion and improvement of accessibility can be considered the main goals that are at the core of the EU Cohesion Policy. Yet, while there exists an abundant literature on the impact of transport infrastructure investment on the overall accessibility level, very few studies try to verify the possible link between accessibility and regional economic development. This issue seems to be particularly interesting in the case of the EU's New Member States that have experienced a big push to develop their transportation networks in the last decade. Hence, in the present paper we apply the potential accessibility indicator for Poland in order to verify the general productivity effects of major transport infrastructure investments between 2004 and 2014. We find that accessibility improvement seems to be weakly but positively correlated with growth in regional employment. However, the impact on the growth of regional production is not statistically significant. We also find that, once nonlinearity is assumed, accessibility improvement does not have a statistically significant impact on urban areas. At the same time it is in fact negatively correlated with output growth in the case of rural areas.