Transport Infrastructure Investment and Economic Growth: a Spatial Analysis of brazilian States

Abstract

The main go of this article is to investigate empirically the impact of public investments in transport infrastructure over the Brazilian economic growth. The main hypotheses investigated are: i) investments in transport infrastructure contribute to the economic growth of the Brazilian states; ii) these investments have larger effects in the less developed regions of Brazil. For this purpose, static and dynamic spatial panel data methods were used for a set of 26 federative units, from 1998 to 2012. The econometric results confirm only the second hypothesis, indicating that investments in transport infrastructure are more productive in the less developed regions of the country (North and Northeast). In addition, based on the descriptive analyzes, the investment per capita in transport infrastructure and the presence of this item in the state budget reduced in the analyzed period.