Monday, June 22, 2009

Infrastructure policy in the USA-Mexico border: Evaluation and policy perspectives

Roberto Duran-Fernandez
Transport Studies Unit Oxford University
September 2008

This paper presents a case study about the road infrastructure needs, and its impact on accessibility and industrial productivity in the US-Mexico border. The paper focuses on the analysis of three networks of projects that were presented in a report prepared for the 35th US-Mexico Border Governors Conference in 2007. These projects comprise a series of local and interregional roads located in the western, central, and eastern areas of the border region. The analytical work uses the North American Road System Model (NARS), a GIS application, to assess the effect of the infrastructure improvements on accessibility at different geographic scales. Finally, we estimate the impact of these accessibility gains on industrial productivity as an application of the econometric assessment presented in Duran (2007). The results of the paper confirm the importance of the road infrastructure in this region. They indicate that the productivity gains that can attributed to accessibility improvements are large enough to paid for the cost if new infrastructure during the life span of the project.

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