Introduzione
Infrastructure plays a fundamental role in the development and growth of a territory. In particular, transport infrastructure (e.g., roads, railways, ports, and airports) is a real pillar of an area's economic competitiveness, facilitating access to markets, job opportunities, and essential services, as well as supporting tourism and culture. Furthermore, an integrated transport network contributes to greater territorial cohesion, reducing the gap between metropolitan areas and more remote areas.
In this context, however, the assessment of the so-called wider economic impacts of transport infrastructure has been the subject of ongoing controversy (Vickerman, 2018). At the heart of this controversy lies a problem of causality: there is no doubt that better transport and better economic performance are linked, but which of the two is the driving force remains ambiguous.
In 1998, the European Commission launched a program to define standards for the development of an integrated and interoperable high-speed rail network to achieve the strategic objectives of social inclusion, cohesion, and accessibility (Cascetta et al., 2013). The projects implemented in Europe cover the following countries, for a total of approximately 6,500 kilometres: (i) France (Paris-Lyon); (ii) Spain (AVE); (iii) Germany (ICE); (iv) Benelux (Thalalux); (v) Italy (TAV). New projects are under discussion or underway in Sweden, the United Kingdom, Portugal, Russia, and Turkey. Since 2011, China has been the country with the largest number of service lines, with more than 3,500 kilometers of railway lines in operation.
For several decades, economic literature has been studying the impact that infrastructure has on the territory, both with theoretical and, above all, empirical contributions. In particular, studies that have assessed the socio-economic impacts of high-speed rail (HSR) can be grouped into: (i) ex-ante assessments, mainly carried out using cost-benefit analyses; (ii) Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) models; (iii) ex-post assessments, using regression and/or counterfactual models (Di Matteo et al., 2022).
This chapter has two objectives. First, provide a theoretical overview of the effects of infrastructure on the territory (paragraph 2), with particular reference to HS, where specific studies exist. A second contribution is a systematic review of the literature on the ex-ante assessment of the socio-economic impacts of new HS lines in Europe (paragraph 3). Finally, section 4 outlines some conclusions.