IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/32800.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

The Spatial Impacts of a Massive Rail Disinvestment Program: The Beeching Axe

Author

Listed:
  • Steve Gibbons
  • Stephan Heblich
  • Edward W. Pinchbeck

Abstract

This paper investigates the reversibility of the effects of transport infrastructure investments, based on a programme that removed much of the rail network in Britain during the mid-20th Century. We find that a 10% loss in rail access between 1950 and 1980 caused a persistent 3% decline in local population relative to unaffected areas, implying that the 1 in 5 places most exposed to the cuts saw 24 percentage points less population growth than the 1 in 5 places that were least exposed. The cuts reduced local jobs and shares of skilled workers and young people.

Suggested Citation

  • Steve Gibbons & Stephan Heblich & Edward W. Pinchbeck, 2024. "The Spatial Impacts of a Massive Rail Disinvestment Program: The Beeching Axe," NBER Working Papers 32800, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    • Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:32800
    Note: DAE
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.nber.org/papers/w32800.pdf
    Download Restriction: Access to the full text is generally limited to series subscribers, however if the top level domain of the client browser is in a developing country or transition economy free access is provided. More information about subscriptions and free access is available at http://www.nber.org/wwphelp.html. Free access is also available to older working papers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to look for a different version below or search for a different version of it.

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Dave Donaldson, 2018. "Railroads of the Raj: Estimating the Impact of Transportation Infrastructure," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 108(4-5), pages 899-934, April.
    2. Redding, Stephen J. & Turner, Matthew A., 2015. "Transportation Costs and the Spatial Organization of Economic Activity," Handbook of Regional and Urban Economics, in: Gilles Duranton & J. V. Henderson & William C. Strange (ed.), Handbook of Regional and Urban Economics, edition 1, volume 5, chapter 0, pages 1339-1398, Elsevier.
    3. Stephen Gibbons & Wenjie Wu, 2017. "Airports and economic performance in China," CentrePiece - The magazine for economic performance 509, Centre for Economic Performance, LSE.
    4. Dave Donaldson & Richard Hornbeck, 2016. "Railroads and American Economic Growth: A "Market Access" Approach," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 131(2), pages 799-858.
    5. Erik Hornung, 2015. "Railroads And Growth In Prussia," Journal of the European Economic Association, European Economic Association, vol. 13(4), pages 699-736, August.
    6. Gonzalez-Navarro, Marco & Turner, Matthew A., 2018. "Subways and urban growth: Evidence from earth," Journal of Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 108(C), pages 85-106.
    7. Yatchew, A., 1997. "An elementary estimator of the partial linear model," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 57(2), pages 135-143, December.
    8. Yatang Lin & Yu Qin & Zhuan Xie, 2016. "High-speed rail in China," CentrePiece - The magazine for economic performance 484, Centre for Economic Performance, LSE.
    9. Andrews,Donald W. K. & Stock,James H. (ed.), 2005. "Identification and Inference for Econometric Models," Cambridge Books, Cambridge University Press, number 9780521844413, September.
    10. Gilles Duranton & J. V. Henderson & William C. Strange (ed.), 2015. "Handbook of Regional and Urban Economics," Handbook of Regional and Urban Economics, Elsevier, edition 1, volume 5, number 5.
    11. Gibbons, Stephen & Wu, Wenjie, 2017. "Airports, market access and local economic performance: Evidence from China," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 83630, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Anna Stansbury & Dan Turner & Ed Balls, 2023. "Tackling the UK’s regional economic inequality: binding constraints and avenues for policy intervention," Contemporary Social Science, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 18(3-4), pages 318-356, August.
    2. Philip McCann & Raquel Ortega-Argilés, 2022. "Regional Innovation, Industrial Policy and UK Interregional Challenges," Hacienda Pública Española / Review of Public Economics, IEF, vol. 243(4), pages 83-100, December.
    3. Di Cataldo, Marco & Romani, Giulia, 2023. "The local impact of closing undersized schools," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 119359, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.
    4. Woan Foong Wong & Simon Fuchs, 2022. "Multimodal Transport Networks," FRB Atlanta Working Paper 2022-13, Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, revised Oct 2024.
    5. Marco Di Cataldo & Giulia Romani, 2023. "Rational cuts? The local impact of closing undersized schools," Working Papers 2023:03, Department of Economics, University of Venice "Ca' Foscari".
    6. Becka Brolinson, 2024. "Valuing public transit: The L‐train shutdown," Real Estate Economics, American Real Estate and Urban Economics Association, vol. 52(3), pages 794-842, May.
    7. Di Cataldo, Marco & Romani, Giulia, 2024. "Rational cuts? The local impact of closing undersized schools," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 126034, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Braun, Sebastian Till & Franke, Richard, 2022. "Railways, Growth, and Industrialization in a Developing German Economy, 1829–1910," The Journal of Economic History, Cambridge University Press, vol. 82(4), pages 1183-1221, December.
    2. Stephan Heblich & Stephen J Redding & Daniel M Sturm, 2020. "The Making of the Modern Metropolis: Evidence from London," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 135(4), pages 2059-2133.
    3. Berger, Thor, 2019. "Railroads and Rural Industrialization: evidence from a Historical Policy Experiment," Explorations in Economic History, Elsevier, vol. 74(C).
    4. Koster, Hans & Hayakawa, Kazunobu & Thisse, Jacques-François, 2021. "High-speed Rail and the Spatial Distribution of Economic Activity: Evidence from Japan's Shinkansen," CEPR Discussion Papers 15771, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    5. Dávid Krisztián Nagy, 2021. "Quantitative Economic Geography Meets History: Questions, Answers and Challenges," Working Papers 1249, Barcelona School of Economics.
    6. Fenske, James & Kala, Namrata & Wei, Jinlin, 2023. "Railways and cities in India," Journal of Development Economics, Elsevier, vol. 161(C).
    7. Olney, William W., 2020. "Cabotage sabotage? The curious case of the Jones Act," Journal of International Economics, Elsevier, vol. 127(C).
    8. Matthias Flückiger & Markus Ludwig, 2019. "Transport infrastructure, growth and persistence: The rise and demise of the Sui Canal," Canadian Journal of Economics/Revue canadienne d'économique, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 52(2), pages 624-666, May.
    9. Julio Martinez-Galarraga & Elisenda Paluzie & Jordi Pons & Javier Silvestre & Daniel A. Tirado, 2021. "New economic geography and economic history: a survey of recent contributions through the lens of the Spanish industrialization process," Cliometrica, Springer;Cliometric Society (Association Francaise de Cliométrie), vol. 15(3), pages 719-751, September.
    10. Roberto Bonfatti & Giovanni Facchini & Alexander Tarasov & Gian Luca Tedeschi & Cecilia Testa, 2021. "Pork, infrastructure and growth: Evidence from the Italian railway expansion," Discussion Papers 2021-04, Nottingham Interdisciplinary Centre for Economic and Political Research (NICEP).
    11. Miquel-Àngel Garcia-López & Alfonso Herranz-Loncán & Filippo Tassinari & Elisabet Viladecans-Marsal, 2021. "Paving the way to modern growth. Evidence from Bourbon roads in Spain," Working Papers 0209, European Historical Economics Society (EHES).
    12. Stef Proost & Jacques-François Thisse, 2019. "What Can Be Learned from Spatial Economics?," Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Association, vol. 57(3), pages 575-643, September.
    13. Gregor Pfeifer & Fabian Wahl & Martyna Marczak, 2018. "Illuminating the World Cup effect: Night lights evidence from South Africa," Journal of Regional Science, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 58(5), pages 887-920, November.
    14. Redding, Stephen, 2021. "Suburbanization in the United States 1970-2010," CEPR Discussion Papers 16174, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    15. Stephen J. Redding, 2022. "Suburbanization in the USA, 1970–2010," Economica, London School of Economics and Political Science, vol. 89(S1), pages 110-136, June.
    16. Carbo, Jose M. & Graham, Daniel J., 2020. "Quantifying the impacts of air transportation on economic productivity: a quasi-experimental causal analysis," Economics of Transportation, Elsevier, vol. 24(C).
    17. David Krisztián Nagy, 2020. "Quantitative economic geography meets history: Questions, answers and challenges," Economics Working Papers 1774, Department of Economics and Business, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, revised Mar 2021.
    18. Felbermayr, Gabriel J. & Tarasov, Alexander, 2022. "Trade and the spatial distribution of transport infrastructure," Journal of Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 130(C).
    19. Li, Bingjing & Ma, Lin, 2022. "JUE insight: Migration, transportation infrastructure, and the spatial transmission of COVID-19 in China," Journal of Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 127(C).
    20. Gibbons, Stephen & Heblich, Stephan & Pinchbeck, Edward W., 2024. "The spatial impacts of a massive rail disinvestment program: the Beeching axe," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 124531, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • H5 - Public Economics - - National Government Expenditures and Related Policies
    • N74 - Economic History - - Economic History: Transport, International and Domestic Trade, Energy, and Other Services - - - Europe: 1913-
    • R1 - Urban, Rural, Regional, Real Estate, and Transportation Economics - - General Regional Economics
    • R40 - Urban, Rural, Regional, Real Estate, and Transportation Economics - - Transportation Economics - - - General

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:32800. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/nberrus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.