Impact of transport infrastructure on socio-economic development of regions: econometric analysis

This article examines the impact of transport infrastructure on socio-economic development of the regions, analyzes theoretical approaches of foreign and domestic authors to the assessment of transport infrastructure in the context of regional development. The subject of the study is the features of the impact of transport infrastructure on the level of socio-economic development of the regions, formalized as gross regional product (GRP). The influence of transport infrastructure on key socio-economic indicators of regional development and the assessment of its significance through the use of econometric methods are substantiated. To collect and process information, methods of analysis and synthesis, induction and deduction were used; for practical justification of hypotheses, analytical, statistical and econometric methods were used; for the conclusions, the method of generalizing materials from scientific, educational and specialized literature, regulatory framework, as well as official statistics data were used. The authors present an attempt to practically justify theoretical approaches to determining the relationship between transport infrastructure and socio-economic development of regions using regression analysis. The study found that the impact of transport infrastructure is heterogeneous – in each region, various significant transport factors influencing economic development are identified, which is due to the peculiarities of the economic structure of the regions, the level of infrastructure development and social aspects. As part of the analysis, the authors were able to establish the statistical significance of the impact of transport infrastructure on economic growth for a number of regions of the Volga Federal District. However, the authors noted that the dynamics of the GRP, as one of the indicators of the level of socio-economic development of the regions under consideration, depends on various factors of the transport infrastructure, which indicates the heterogeneity of such impact. Based on the results of the study, the authors identified the problem of accounting for spatial externalities affecting interregional transport links, which requires a more comprehensive approach to assessing transport infrastructure. The authors concluded that it is necessary to develop a universal and transparent methodology for accounting for external spatial externalities affecting the socio-economic dynamics of the regions.