Transportation Investments and Productivity Analysis of a Japanese Case Study

Over the last two decades, there have been several studies on productivity related to transportation investments in not only Japan but also several foreign countries. However, these prior studies did not achieve common results as they did not use a unified format for measuring the service level of the transportation network and using the dataset. Therefore, this study classifies previous studies from six points of view. These are analytical method, functional type, explained variable, service level of the transportation network, aggregation level, and estimation method. This study examines the differences in results caused by the diversity of analytical methods. In addition, this study estimates the production function using two analytical methods with Japanese data. Then, the relationship between the productivity and transport investments is revealed. From this result, several issues are confirmed.