A Scientometric Analysis and Overview of Research on Infrastructure Externalities

Abstract

There is a growing level of concern regarding infrastructure externalities globally. However, most of the previous relevant reviews were undertaken manually and few of them covered all infrastructure systems. This study conducted a scientometric analysis and overview of the research on externalities of all infrastructure systems. The analysis results of 743 articles that were rigorously selected first showed the increasing trend of research interest in infrastructure externalities. Moreover, the results demonstrated productive and influential journals, scholars, and institutions, and their collaboration networks. Furthermore, research on the spillover effects of the infrastructure on economic growth, airport-related externalities, road transport-related externalities, and externalities of ecosystem services and energy systems were identified as the four main research domains. The evolution of the research is reflected in the focus change from economic aspects to environment aspects, from government governance to assessing and pricing by the market, and from airport to other infrastructure systems. Additionally, this study identified the scientific knowledge base supporting each research domain. Finally, this study pointed out research gaps and future research directions in the aspects of knowledge base, multi-dimensional evaluation, and multiple governance strategies. The results could cultivate deeper and more carefully focused research into this field in the academic community, and assist policymakers and practitioners in research planning and funding efforts.

A Three-Dimensional Evaluation Model of the Externalities of Highway Infrastructures to Capture the Temporal and Spatial Distance to Optimal—A Case Study of China

“…The comprehensive literature review of the externalities of highway infrastructures in this study and a scientometric analysis of infrastructure externalities conducted by Zhu et al [11] all showed that there are many research on the needs of transport, the impact of transport, and the externalities of transport, providing a solid scientific knowledge base for the evaluation of the externalities of highway infrastructures. However, there are still research gaps in two main perspectives.…”

“…The development of highway infrastructures comes from the needs of the economy, society, and environment, and conversely, has impacts on these three aspects. The lack of externality evaluation of any dimension will not only bias the view of highway-related externality problems, but also lead to the distortions in the planning and development of highway infrastructures, leading to government failure or market failure for the governance of externalities [11,28,35]. The evaluation indexes in previous research are not comprehensive.…”

“…Hedonic pricing model or difference-in-differences estimators are popularly used methods to estimate the increase in housing prices near highway infrastructures [22][23][24]. With the accumulation of panel data and the improvement of computing power, such estimation become mature and popular and has been considered in policy decision making [11].…”

“…It is worth noting that local externalities caused by highway infrastructures, such as the effects of highway development on nearby housing prices [64], are not considered in this study. Although numerous articles discuss the impact of transportation infrastructures on the house prices caused by the commuting convenience or accessibility [11,65], from a region's perspective, such a kind of change in house price is more the relative change of house prices in different areas in the region. From the perspective of a region, the improvement of transportation infrastructure improves the image of the region and promotes its economic growth.…”

“…One of the possible reasons lies in the lack of a comprehensive quantitative evaluation of economic, social, and ecological externalities. Without such comprehensive evaluation, the influencing factors and the formation mechanism of the externalities of highway infrastructures cannot be accurately quantified, which is not conducive to the governance or internalization of external effects and the formulation of countermeasures with long-term and sustainable effects [11].…”