Transport infrastructure, economic development and urbanization in India (1990–2011): Is there any causal relationship? Tuhin Subhra Maparu a,⇑ , Tarak Nath Mazumder b a Department of Planning and Architecture, National Institute of Technology, Rourkela 769008, India b Department of Architecture and Regional Planning, Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur 721302, India article info Article history: Received 20 April 2016 Received in revised form 3 December 2016 Accepted 28 April 2017 Keywords: Transport infrastructure Economic development Urbanization Granger causality Cointegration abstract Development of transport infrastructure has long been taken as a major tool in promoting economic development and urbanization of a region. However, it is quite debatable whether transport infrastructure promotes economic development and urbanization, or economic development and urbanization create demand first which leads to investment in transport infrastructure. Each of the views has theoretical support. Therefore, apart from theory, empirical evidence is required to establish direction of causality, which bears seri- ous policy implications. This study looks into different sub-sectors of transport infrastruc- ture to find its long-run relationship and direction of causality with economic development and urbanization. It first finds the order of integration of the variables and then tries to find their causal relationship using cointegration and Granger causality test approach for India between 1990 and 2011. It uses Vector Auto-Regression and Vector Error Correction model to find short-run and long-run causality. Results showed existence of long-run relationship between transport infrastructure and economic development, and the direction of causal- ity is from economic development to transport infrastructure in most of the cases, thus drawing support in favor of Wagner’s law. Ó 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction Economic development of a region has remained a major goal in regional planning as it is also thought to improve the quality of life of people. Economic development in terms of per capita income or per capita Gross Domestic Product (GDP) has remained a yardstick for measuring development of a region for a long period of time. Other indicators for devel- opment, such as Human Development Index (HDI), was developed later to address quality of life by taking into considera- tions aspects such as access to education and health apart from economic development. However, coefficient of correlation between ranking of per capita GDP and HDI was found to be 0.92 for the study of 175 nations (Meier and Rauch, 2012, p. 14), indicating close association between economic development and quality of life. Various researchers have found close association between investment in infrastructure and economic development of a region (Aschauer, 1989; Fan and Chan-Kang, 2008; Kumar, 2002; Lall, 2007). Among the different types of infrastructure, transport infrastructure is considered to be one of the most important one by the policy makers since transport cost is very http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.tra.2017.04.033 0965-8564/Ó 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. ⇑ Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: tuhin.maparu@gmail.com (T.S. Maparu), taraknm@arp.iitkgp.ernet.in (T.N. Mazumder). Transportation Research Part A 100 (2017) 319–336 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Transportation Research Part A journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/tra