Jeongkyung Won

Jeongkyung Won, M.A. in Economics from the Sogang University, School of Economics, South Korea, will present "Paving the Road to Prosperity? Infrastructure Investments and the Bottleneck to Growth"

Abstract:
Can infrastructure investments that promote local economic activities now reduce them later? To answer this question, I explore the historical context of South Korea, in which the government dramatically expanded paved connections to rural areas. I combine historical maps and deep learning to restore paved road networks. Then, I measure changes in rural areas’ market access to cities by calculating the least travel costs to cities. I find that the rural areas that experienced relatively larger increases in accessibility to cities are less developed today than the other rural areas at the time. I show that the paved connection to cities induced the rural areas to specialize in agriculture in inter-regional trade, which did not lead to industrial diversification into other sectors afterward.