Public capital and regional economic growth

Abstract

The paper reviews the literature on the impact of public capital on regional economic growth. It presents the main points of the debate on the role of infrastructure and focuses largely on the empirical research undertaken over the past decade. The paper considers different function forms (production function vs cost function approach) and different econometric specifications (aggregated estimation vs disaggregated estimation). Particular attention is paid to spatial distributions of regional activity as a consequence of the provision of infrastructure. (original abstract)