Transport Costs and Rural Development
通过一个两区域一般均衡模型，分析运输成本下降对农村发展的影响，发现初期负面但最终正面的关系，对研究区域经济、农业政策和交通规划的学者有参考价值。
Innovations that reduce costs of transport from rural locations may also reduce transport costs to rural areas. As transport costs fall, producers can afford to concentrate and achieve economies of scale. This paper explains an initially negative, but ultimately positive, relationship between reductions in transport costs and rural development. A two‐region general equilibrium model with firm and worker spatial mobility highlights the firm and household location implications of costly transport‐service use by both industry and agriculture in the context of scale economies and product differentiation. The computable general equilibrium model is initialized and verified with a bi‐regional social accounting matrix and then used for simulations. Changes in relative transport costs are shown to affect relative regional wage rates, thus also determining the location of “production‐cost‐oriented” firms.