Assessing economic impacts of large-scale transport infrastructure projects

Assessment of large-scale transport infrastructure projects by a classical four-stage transport network model is meant to capture only the direct benefits of transport policies, while the additional indirect economic effects in nontransport markets would be partially neglected. The intent of this paper is to apply an integrated economy-transport-environment assessment model focusing on the assessment of economic impacts of national or supranational transport policies to the question of the size of indirect economic impacts of a single large-scale project. Such a model makes it possible to consider the interaction between transport and the economy as well as between the economy and transport, closing the transport-economy feedback loop. For this purpose, the European assessment of transport strategies (ASTRA) model is refined to model the implementation of the planned high-speed railway link on the Lyon-Turin corridor. This line forms part of the Trans-European Transpor Networks. The estimated cost of the 257 kin of new tracks is EURO13 billion over 10 years, which would be a sufficient size to make it a large-scale project. The results of the analysis indicate the feasibility of applying the ASTRA model for such a project assessment. Economic impacts on the country level can be detected as well as impacts for the 15 Western European Union countries, although the latter are rather small if they are measured as percentage changes to a reference scenario. A crucial task remains the analysis of impact chains that have caused and explain the model results.