Highway to Success in India : The Impact of the Golden Quadrilateral Project for the Location and Performance of Manufacturing

Ghani, Ejaz ; Goswami, Arti Grover ; Kerr, William R.

World Bank, Washington, DC

关键词: ACCESS ROADS;    ACCESSIBILITY;    ACCOUNTING;    ADMINISTRATIVE SUBDIVISIONS;    AGGLOMERATION ECONOMIES;   

DOI  :  10.1596/1813-9450-6320
RP-ID  :  WPS6320

学科分类：社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）

来源: World Bank Open Knowledge Repository

【 摘 要 】

The infrastructure gap is one of themost significant impediments to India realizing its growthand poverty reduction potential. Although India s transportnetwork is one of the most extensive in the world,accessibility and connectivity are limited. Only 20 percentof the national highway network (which carries 40 percent oftraffic) is four-lane and one-fourth of the rural populationdoes not have access to an all-weather road. It is estimatedthat the transport sector alone will require an investmentof nearly US$500 billion over the next 10 years. This paperinvestigates the impact of the Golden Quadrilateral highwayproject on the Indian organized manufacturing sector usingenterprise data. The Golden Quadrilateral project upgradedthe quality and width of 5,846 km of roads in India. Theanalysis uses a difference-in-difference estimation strategyto compare non-nodal districts based on their distance fromthe highway system. It finds several positive effects fornon-nodal districts located 0-10 km from the GoldenQuadrilateral that are not present in districts 10-50 kmaway, most notably higher entry rates and increases in plantproductivity. These results are not present for districtslocated on another major highway system, the North-SouthEast-West corridor. Improvements for portions of theNorth-South East-West corridor system were planned to occurat the same time as the Golden Quadrilateral but weresubsequently delayed. Additional tests show that the GoldenQuadrilateral project s effect operates in part through astronger sorting of land-intensive industries from nodaldistricts to non-nodal districts located on the GoldenQuadrilateral network. The Golden Quadrilateral upgradesfurther helped spread economic activity to moderate-densitydistricts and intermediate size cities.