Page 392 - 360.revista de Alta Velocidad - Nº 5

Zhenhua Chen

an impact assessment at the national level or within a single-region. Because these models
only include a single-region, the results of assessments on infrastructure investment are often
limited due to the ignorance of spatial spillover effects that are manifested as the change of
inter-regional commodity and factor input flows.

Spatial CGE (SCGE), also known as Multi-regional CGE model, which usually consists of more than
two regions as independent economies in the modeling framework, are generally considered
more relevant to regional economic impact assessment of infrastructure systems because
interregional trade is explicitly taken into account through a bottom-up approach. Hence, the
model is able to measure distinct regional impacts and associated regional spillover effects
caused by a policy shock. As shown in Table 2, several SCGE models were developed and applied
for transportation infrastructure assessment. For instance, Haddad et al. (2010) evaluated the
long-run regional impacts of transportation sectors in Brazil using a SCGE model called B-MARIA.
The model was developed based on the MONASH model, which is a multiregional CGE model for
the Australian economy originally built by Adams et al. (1994). In order to evaluate the regional
economic impacts of the Trans-European Transport Networks, Bröcker (1998) developed a SCGE
model consists of 1341 regions at the NUTS 3 level. The impacts were modeled by reducing
transport costs along these links and tracing the effects through the economy.

390 360.revista de alta velocidad