One Model Fits All? Determinants of Transport Costs Across Sectors and Country Groups

Abstract

Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. One model ts all? Terms of use: Documents inDeterminants of transport costs across sectors and country groups * April 2011Hannah Schürenberg-Frosch ‡ AbstractWe show with the aid of pooled OLS estimations that investments in improved road infrastructure have the potential to signi cantly reduce transport costs. However, this result can only be clearly con rmed for industrial countries and is of primary importance for production and transportation of agricultural goods. For developing and transition countries we nd other determinants such as weather conditions to be more important in determining transport costs. A key variable, especially in these countries, is corruption. At very high levels corruption has the potential to prevent positive e ects from roads on transport costs or to even reverse them. This paper contributes to the literature on infrastructure investment by introducing and applying an internationally comparable measure of transport costs which can be calculated for a large and growing number of countries. We isolate important determinants of transport costs and provide insights into international and sectoral di erences concerning the impact of roads on transport costs. We conclude that investment in transport infrastructure can have substantial positive e ects especially on agricultural production and the e cient marketing of agricultural products but only if speci c conditions are in place. JEL Classi cation: O11, R42, O18

Improving Africa's Roads: Modelling Infrastructure Investment and Its Effect on Sectoral Production Behaviour

“…Nonetheless, it is desirable to have even more reliable estimations of the elasticity. A first attempt to do so can be found in Schürenberg-Frosch (2011) where the dataset is expanded to a higher number of countries and a panel structure, and the analysis is completed by a larger set of control variables.…”