Road Capacity, Domestic Trade and Regional Outcomes

Railways and Roadways to Trust

“…By 2015, the arterial routes had been improved with dual carriageways accounting for 35% of inter-provincial roads, up from 10% in 2002. This increase in the capacity allowed vehicles to travel faster, making arrival times more predictable and reducing accident rates, with the number of fatalities per kilometer traveled declining by 57% between 2002 and 2014 (Coşar et al, 2022).…”

“…On the top of that highway construction promotes residential decentralization of the cities leading the within-central city commuters to become within-suburb commuters (Baum-Snow, 2010. A recent paper by Coşar et al (2022) provides evidence that public investment in roads have a positive impact of reduced travel times on trade as well as local manufacturing employment and wages. Additional evidence demonstrates that air connectivity accelerates the movement of capital and enhances economic development but increases also the inequality locally (Campante and Yanagizawa-Drott, 2018).…”

“…We exploit the market access framework proposed by Donaldson and Hornbeck (2016), and then used widely in the empirical literature (see Aggarwal et al (2018), Jedwab and Storeygard (2022), Melander (2020), Coşar et al (2022) and Perlman (2017) among others) to introduce as a mechanism the access to trust. Our aim is to associate the average level of trust of a given Nuts 2 region with the level of trust of the all the other regions weighted by the transportation cost to reach to them.…”

Roads and intra‐national trade: Evidence from Italian regions

“…While previous literature has mainly focused on international trade (see, among others, Bottasso et al, 2018; Clark et al, 2004; Coşar & Demir, 2016; Donaubauer et al, 2018; Martincus et al, 2017), this study considers intra‐national trade flows which have attracted relatively less attention from researchers. Certainly, there are important exceptions such as Duranton et al (2014), Duranton (2015) and Coşar et al (2022), which analyse the relationship between roads and trade for US cities, cities in Colombia, and districts in Turkey, respectively. Furthermore, considering that intra‐national trade accounts for a large part of world trade and that investment in transport infrastructure can directly influence the degree of trade integration within a country (Faber, 2014), it becomes important to provide novel evidence on this issue for a country that has never been investigated before.…”

Overland Transport Costs: A Review

“…Otherwise, they can be aggregated to a regional level to create an internal trade flow matrix. In a recent application using Turkish data,Coşar et al (2021) estimate the impact of road capacity (i.e., lanes) and quality improvements. According to their results, a one-hour reduction in travel time between two districts increases bilateral trade between those districts by around 8.2 percent.…”