7. Transport Policy and Regional Development: The Economic Impact of Regional Accessibility on Economic Sectors

Regional accessibility is an important location factor, which enhance the region and, therefore, promote economic growth. It is the virtual aim of transport policy, on European as well as on national level, to strengthen regional accessibility. But available resources to do so are limited. Therefore, new investment and enlargement in transport infrastructure should be based on efficiency considerations. This article focuses on the economic impact of regional accessibility and in different economic sectors in order to prepare a methodology of planning for efficient transport infrastructure investment along the corridor Rotterdam-Genoa. The approach takes into consideration that the output of economic sectors depends differently on logistic services. If we consider different regional concentrations of specific sectorial activity, we can assume different economic impacts of transport infrastructure investment on different regions or, in other words, higher ‘costs of non-doing’ if bottlenecks in transport infrastructure persist. Therefore, the link between transport costs and regional accessibility in transport infrastructure is analyzed. The results of an empirical study which surveys the correlation between regional accessibility and regional sector output will be described.