Over the past two decades, China has embarked on an ambitious program of expressway network expansion. By facilitating market integration, this program aims both to promote efficiency at the national level and to contribute to the catch-up of lagging inland regions with prosperous Eastern ones....

The authors combine measures of urban form and public transit supply for 114 urbanized areas with the 1990 Nationwide Personal Transportation Survey to address two questions: (1) How do measures of urban form, including city shape, road density, the spatial distribution of population, and...

In the urban planning literature, it is frequently explicitly asserted or strongly implied that ongoing urban sprawl and decentralization can lead to development patterns that are unsustainable in the long run. One manifestation of such an outcome is that if extensive road investments occur,...

How would travel demand in Sao Paulo respond to demand management instruments? Could higher gasoline prices or lower metro fares (or changes in travel time) help reduce congestion or pollution? The authors use cross-sectional variation from an urban travel survey to study the substitutability in...

One of the major difficulties in doing cost-benefit analysis of a development project is to estimate the total economic value of project benefits, which are usually multi-dimensional andinclude goods and services that are not traded in the market. Challenges also arise in aggregating the values...

In Central America, like many other developing regions, high transport costs are cited as an impediment to trade and economic growth. Prices for road freight transport -- a key mode of transport comprising a significant share of total transport costs for intra- and extra-regional trade, are...

Studies comparing household surveys with on-site interceptor surveys have typically accounted for over-sampling avid users in the on-site interceptor surveys (that is, endogenous stratification). However, these studies have typically not accounted for the possibility that the household sample...

Academics and policy makers have long considered an adequate supply of infrastructure services to be essential for economic development. This paper reviews recent theoretical and empirical literature on the effects of infrastructure development on growth and income distribution. The theoretical...

If the South Asia region hopes to meet its development goals and not risk slowing down or even halting growth, poverty alleviation, and shared prosperity, it is essential to make closing its huge infrastructure gap a priority. Identifying and addressing gaps in the data on expenditure, access,...

Using bilateral migration flow data from the 2010 population census of Nepal, this paper provides evidence on the importance of public infrastructure and services in determining migration flows. The empirical specification, based on a generalized nested logit model, corrects for the non-random...