Remote rural areas tend to experience slower population growth (sometimes decline), slower growth in GDP, fewer employment opportunities and lower productivity relative to the economy as a whole. Transport policy interventions are typically focussed on addressing structural economic weaknesses....

We analyze investment decisions when information is costly, with and without delegation to an agent. We use a rational-inattention model and compare it with a canonical signal-extraction model. We identify three "investment conditions". In "sour" conditions, no information is acquired and no...

Good infrastructure is linked to economic growth and development, without deny. The study explores five problematic infrastructure factors affecting development in Zimbabwe. The Zimbabwean nation has been struggling to recover from economic crisis which has bedevilled the economy for quite a...

This paper documents the potential employment and other value-added benefits of infrastructure investments in Ontario. In particular, it details the impact of infrastructure investment as a counter-cyclical fiscal policy tool. A review of the recent literature reveals that infrastructure...

This paper studies the impact of spatial frictions on Asia's long-term spatial development. Using the framework provided in Desmet, Nagy, and Rossi-Hansberg (2016), we analyze the evolution of Asia's economy and the relative performance of specific regions and countries. We then perform a number...

This study examines the relationship between fatality risk (number of fatalities per 10,000 people), the level of motorization (number of vehicles per 10,000 people) and fatality rate (number of fatalities per 10,000 vehicles), and the real per capita GDP across Indian states and union...

Indian Railways is a little over a century and a half old. Its development over the decades has been gradual. It has been and continues to be the “lifeline for the socioeconomic growth of India,” by connecting human settlements across the country and simultaneously transporting various...

Gustavsson [1999] finds that policies that promote international trade increase the size of a country’s largest city relative to the country’s total population, which is defined here as an increase in urban gigantism. In contrast, Ades and Glaeser [1995] report urban gigantism is reduced by...

In this paper, we analyse economic development and growth through traditional measures (gross domestic product and human development index) and Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) in Colombian departments over the period 1993-2007. We use a DEA model to measure and rank economic development and...

We develop a new methodology for quantifying the tasks undertaken within occupations using 3,000 verbs from around 12,000 occupational descriptions in the Dictionary of Occupational Titles (DOTs).  Using micro-data from the United States from 1880-2000, we find an increase in the employment...