Spatial Spillover Effect of Public Infrastructure in Different GDP Sector Compositions: Spatial Panel Evidence in Eu-28 Regions

Abstract

Spillovers have attracted wide attention in the areas of research in economics during the past decades. The reason for the interest in the topic lies in their important role in endogenous growth theory and the explanation of productivity growth. This paper investigates the spatial spillover of different types of public infrastructure on economic growth across EU-28 NUTS-II regions during 1995-2015. Particularly, we developed the previous studies by consedeing spillover in all types of the GDP sector composition including agriculture, industry, and services. The spatial Durbin panel data model is employed to consider spatial spillovers of both public infrastructure and economic growth. Empirical results show the positive spatial spillovers of communication infrastructure in all the sectors. The spillover effect of transport infrastructure is positive in the service and agricultural sector, whereas it is negative in the industry sector. Moreover, the spillover effect of local infrastructure is insignificant in all three sectors. Finally, we find significant evidence of positive geographical spillovers of economic growth implying spatially-growth dependency of regions to growth rate of neighboring regions.<br /> JEL Classification: H54, O47, C21