Highway to Success in India: The Impact of the Golden Quadrilateral Project for the Location and Performance of Manufacturing

Abstract

The Policy Research Working Paper Series disseminates the findings of work in progress to encourage the exchange of ideas about development issues. An objective of the series is to get the findings out quickly, even if the presentations are less than fully polished. The papers carry the names of the authors and should be cited accordingly. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed in this paper are entirely those of the authors. They do not necessarily represent the views of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development/World Bank and its affiliated organizations, or those of the Executive Directors of the World Bank or the governments they represent.

Will Market Competition Trump Gender Discrimination in India?

“…The upgrades also encouraged decentralization by making intermediate cities more attractive for manufacturing entrants. Importantly, and the subject of ongoing research, the upgrades are also associated with better allocative efficiency in the organized manufacturing sector (Ghani, Goswami and Kerr, 2016a). Our descriptive results, however, do not find any impact of such competitive forces on gender segmentation among districts located in proximity to the GQ highways.…”

“…This has perhaps been a result of a conscious strategy of restructuring the economy through a wide variety of reforms, such as the massive trade liberalization episode of the 1990s, the large-scale investment in highway infrastructure in the 2000s, and more recently the domestic reforms that dismantled reservations of products for smaller plants. These macro reforms are known to have enhanced economic activity and improved allocative efficiency and productivity at the firm level (Ghani, Goswami and Kerr, 2016a;Topalova and Khandelwal, 2011;Tewari and Wilde, 2015). As opposed to the theoretical predictions of competition in reducing taste-based discrimination, our aggregate level trends point to an increase in gender segmentation in Indian manufacturing and services sectors.…”

Transportation Costs and the Spatial Organization of Economic Activity

“…Every other implementation of this research design we survey arrives at the opposite conclusion, that is, that transportation infrastructure attracts (or creates) economic activity. Ghani et al (2013) use the inconsequential units approach to estimate the intercity regression for "The Golden Quadrilateral project", which upgraded the quality and width of 5,846 km of roads in India. A difference-in-differences specification is used to compare non-nodal districts based on their distance from the highway system.…”

The Brasília Experiment: Road Access and the Spatial Pattern of Long-Term Local Development in Brazil

“…This paper adds to a recent strand of literature that tackles the issue of transportation infrastructure impact using spatially disaggregated data. First it is related to contributions that have found evidence of specic positive impacts of infrastructure access on a number of development outcomes, such as trade (Donaldson, 2010;Michaels, 2008), rms' growth and eciency (Datta, 2012;Ghani, Goswami and Kerr, 2013), urban growth (Duranton and Turner, 2011), population (Atack et al, 2009), and income levels (Storeygard, 2012, Banerjee, Duo andQian, 2012). 3 We share with this last paper (as well as Donaldson and Hornbeck, 2012) the use of straight lines based on historical preconditions to provide an exogenous measure of access to modern transportation corridors.…”