Does transport accessibility condition regional specialisation in manufacturing across Europe?

Toni Mora (1) , Rosina Moreno (2)

1 Universitat Internacional de Catalunya & Barcelona Institute of Economics
2 Econometric, Statistics and Spanish Economy

The present paper focuses on the general debate over the importance of infrastructure in the course of ongoing European integration. Specifically, we want to analyse whether the accessibility created by transport infrastructure, in other words, the improvement in the access to transport network, can have any effect on the European regional specialisation levels within manufacturing sectors. Our results point to the conclusion that the higher the accessibility cost in a region, the higher the specialisation level within manufacturing sectors in such a region. In essence, our findings would rely on the fact that those regional economies being far (either because of an excessive time cost access or a lower potential accessibility) need to be more specialised in one or few manufacturing sectors than those other regional economies with lower accessibility costs.

Mots clés: Social Sciences & Humanities

Domaines: Science politique

Toni Mora, Rosina Moreno. Does transport accessibility condition regional specialisation in manufacturing across Europe?. Regional Studies, 2011, pp.1. ⟨10.1080/00343404.2011.598502⟩. ⟨hal-00735547⟩