Road Connectivity and the Border Effect Evidence from Europe
Several studies have reported a large negative effect of national borders on the volume of trade. The authors provide new estimates of the border effect for continental Europe using road rather than great circle – or "as-crows-fly" – distance. Road distances for 48,180 European city pairs have been extracted from Bing Maps Routing Services. As the dataset also has information on travel time, the authors are able to consider costs related to time in addition to those depending on distance. They find that for the same great circle distance and the same city size, the road distance between two cities located in the same country is around 10% shorter than that between cities located in different ones. Travel speed is also higher between cities in the same country. The authors find that by using measures based on the actual road distance rather than the great circle distance, the negative effect of international borders on goods trade in a standard gravity equation is lowered by around 15%. Time-related trade costs account for an additional 10% reduction in the border effect. Overall these results point to the importance of road networks – and road transport policy in general – to enhance market integration.
- Record URL:
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Corporate Authors:
Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)
2, rue André Pascal
Paris, France 75775 Paris Cedex 16 -
Authors:
- Braconier, Henrik
- Pisu, Mauro
- Publication Date: 2013-7-1
Language
- English
Media Info
- Media Type: Digital/other
- Pagination: 31p
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Serial:
- OECD Economics Department Working Papers
- Issue Number: 1073
- Publisher: Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)
- EISSN: 1815-1973
- Serial URL: dx.doi.org/10.1787/18151973
Subject/Index Terms
- TRT Terms: Distance; Highway design; Highway travel; International borders; International trade; Travel time
- Geographic Terms: Europe
- Subject Areas: Freight Transportation; Highways; Planning and Forecasting; I72: Traffic and Transport Planning;
Filing Info
- Accession Number: 01487885
- Record Type: Publication
- Files: TRIS
- Created Date: Jul 23 2013 11:45AM