The promises for job creation of road infrastructure are exaggerated
Trouble with this article is that you wouldn’t start from here. These are the pronouncements of another academic who makes an abstract point without reference to relative competitive disadvantage those places which don’t have a good road infrastructure begin with. Read on and see if you agree with him:
Hardly a day goes by without a headline proclaiming the transformation of tarmac and concrete into well-paid, sustainable jobs. These claims for infrastructure projects are a lot like alchemy and divert attention away from other, more sustainable, options for job creation.
An excellent example is the Heysham M6 link road (the Lancaster northern bypass), a four-mile stretch that was approved for construction in March this year at a cost of £123m.
Over a three-year period, Lancashire county council reduced its estimate of the number of jobs that the project would create by a factor of 10, down from 6,000 to 600. It is, of course, not possible with any meaningful precision to say how many jobs are created or, indeed, lost when a new road is inserted into a local economy.
This was the conclusion reached by a government inquiry in 1999 (the standing advisory committee on trunk road assessment). Instead, it found that road building “may sometimes benefit [one city or region] to the disbenefit of the other”. This is a strong warning against exaggerated claims. Unfortunately, it is routinely ignored.
The committee also concluded that there was no “convincing general evidence of the size, nature or direction of local economic impacts” from completed transport projects. A year later it said: “Better communications will enlarge markets for goods, services and workers: the area as a whole may gain or lose from this depending on the structure and competitiveness of the local economy. It follows that there is no simple, unambiguous link between transport provision and local regeneration.”