1 New Road Transport Infrastructure and Sectoral Regional Growth: A SCGE Analysis for the A4 extension to the Austrian- Hungarian border Christoph Schmid 1 , Karl W. Steininger 1,2† and Alfried Braumann 3 March 31, 2007 ABSTRACT: In mature economies new transport infrastructure (beyond bottle-neck elimination) is considered to hardly influence overall growth, but well so its spatial distribution and implied transport emissions. In a sectorally diversified spatial computable general equilibrium (SCGE) model of the Lower Austrian – Burgenland new highway (opened in 1991) to the now new member state Hungary, we analyse regional growth. Based on a GIS-approach we acknowledge both actual freight transport cost reduction by sector and interregional link and labour force accessibility change. We find that freight transport cost reduction even for a small region does have negligible overall economic impacts. However, it is a few transport intensive sectors that show substantial impact in interregional trading prices and regional output. In particular our findings point out, that locally specific sectoral shares in production, freight transport cost shares, and – most of all – accessibility determine the order of magnitude of regional economic impact and transport emission consequences. KEYWORDS: spatial planning, spatial CGE, empirical new economic geography, production and consumption location modelling, transport emissions JEL: C68, D58, R12, R40 ACKNOWLEDGMENT: This research was supported by the Research Fund of the Austrian National Bank (Grant 11502); the authors thank for this funds financing enabling the present work. The authors also thank Birgit Friedl, Laurent Franckx, Olivia Koland and Gerold Zakarias for inspiring discussions and helpful comments. We especially point out the collaboration in access potential research with Stefan Schönfelder. 1 Wegener Center for Climate and Global Change, University of Graz, Leechgasse 25, A-8010 Graz, Austria 2 Department of Economics, University of Graz, Universitaetsstr. 15, A-8010 Graz † corresponding author: Karl W. Steininger (phone +43 316 380 8441, fax +43 316 380 9830, e- mail: karl.steininger@uni-graz.at). 3 Trafico Verkehrsplanung, Filigradergasse 6/2, A-1060 Vienna