Augustin Ignatov awarded with the Dorel Ailenei Diploma for the best paper presented by a young scientist by the Romanian Regional Science Association.
The Dorel AILENEI Award is presented to a young researcher who best exemplifies by his (her) works the professional, ducational, moral and humanitarian principles of university professor Dorel AILENEI, an outstanding researcher, a founding member and Vice-President of the Romanian Regional Science Association. He will always be remembered for his dedication to the younger researchers, through generous educational service and efficient university management.
Since the Romanian Regional Science Association is a scientific organization, we believe that it is just fitting that we should honor the activity of Professor Dorel AILENEI, to prolong his career goals and legacy, through the granting of this award to:
AUGUSTIN IGNATOV a young researcher who has brought by his paper an important contribution to the development of regional
science.
«Highways and Income in the European Union: Total Welfare and Interregional Exchange Gains Estimation» Abstract This paper estimates the impact of highways on the European Union’s economy. Consolidation of highway network could increase the total welfare of regions by improving their general productivity. Part of these total gains may be related to interregional exchanges. For the estimation of highways’ impact on total welfare of regions, this paper applies a standard IV strategy exploiting the conditional exogeneity of 1 to 4 years lagged fatalities in road accidents. To estimate the proportion of the total gains which is related to interregional exchanges, I develop a network database of Euclidean distances and calculate the shortest region to region paths using the Dijkstra’s algorithm. This data is used to measure regions’ market potential which represents the discounted sum of GDPs surrounding each region. Subsequently, I estimate the relation between market potential and regions’ income and respectively the one between highways and market potential. For this paper, I build a new unbalanced panel using yearly data provided by Eurostat covering the period of 2000-2017. The results suggest that the European GDP in 2018 would have diminished by 3.2% including 0.49% in interregional exchange gains if the highway network had stayed at the level of 2000. The results are relatively robust regarding the reliability tests, different model and sample specifications. |