There have been significant improvements in transportation infrastructure and technology over the last three hundred years. Our ancestors in the late 1800s did not have air-travel, internal combustion engines, and the inter-oceanic canals that people enjoy today. Transportation was even more difficult in the early 1700s because of poorly made roads, a lack of inland waterways, and the absence of steam power. How significant were these transport improvements to economic development over the last three hundred years?
It was in the 1700s that modern economic growth began with the Industrial Revolution in England. Changes in technology, like the advent of the steam engine, and the growth of manufacturing employment in cities allowed wages to begin their slow increase that continues to this day. Improvements to England's transport infrastructure and technology are possibly crucial factors underlying the Industrial Revolution. There was an expansion in river navigation and road infrastructure in the mid-1700s and by the early 1800s a canal network was created. The application of steam power in the 1830s further revolutionized transport leading to steam ships and railways.
The relationship between transportation improvements and the Industrial Revolution is much discussed by economists studying history and economic growth but there is no consensus on the magnitudes and the mechanisms of change. The importance of transport change goes beyond historical studies. It is well known that highly productive cities and regions can co-exist with less productive ones. Why is this so? Why does economic development not happen everywhere even when institutions are similar? One theory states that differences in the financial and time cost of reaching markets causes differences in development. History offers a unique context to study such theories because researchers can examine large-scale changes in infrastructure and communications technology.
This project makes use of advances in Geographical Information Systems (GIS) software to examine how transport improvements influenced the Industrial Revolution in England. Using GIS, it is now possible to precisely model the transport cost and travel time between any two locations provided there are digital maps of the transport network. The project will build on existing GIS maps of waterways and railways compiled by the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure in the U.K. and it will create new GIS maps for turnpike roads, pre-turnpike roads, and ports. The maps will be dynamic displaying the transport network (road, water, or rail) at all points in time, say 1700, 1750, or 1850.
The dynamic GIS maps will be used to estimate shipping costs and travel times between all English cities in every year from 1700 to 1870. Shipping costs and travel times will be utilized to estimate the rate of productivity growth across the transport sector including the cost savings associated with the spread of good roads, canals and railways. The project will also estimate the "social saving" from transport innovations. The social saving of canals, for example, is measured by the added cost of shipping goods by road instead of by canal. This project will be the first to estimate the social saving using more precise measures of transport costs and traffic flows between cities. Moreover, it will assess each city's cost of accessing markets and study the effect on its wages and adoption of technologies, like the steam engine.
The research conducted under this grant -- which is jointly funded by the Economics Program and the Geography and Spatial Sciences -- is complementing theoretical and empirical work focusing on the links between market access and economic development in more recent time periods. The GIS maps of transport networks will be made available to the public and will constitute a valuable set of resources for diverse scholarly and educational purposes. Lastly, there is a potential impact on policy-making. If it is established that market access influences technology adoption then policy interventions related to transport may be able to accelerate productivity or change its spatial distribution.
