Research 350 - NZ Transport Agency

1. INTRODUCTION
1. Introduction
The overall objective of this report is to appraise the evidence available internationally on the
national and regional/local economic development benefits of land transport investment, and
to develop recommendations and guidelines to assist New Zealand authorities in the
assessment of economic development benefits of potential transport investment projects.
The project relates directly to the statement in the New Zealand Transport Strategy (NZTS) of
December 2002: ‘To help make decisions that are economically, socially and environmentally
sustainable we will need to improve our understanding of the relationship in the New Zealand
context, between economic development and transport’.
In broad terms, the purpose of this report is threefold:
• To review the major approaches to assessing the national economic benefits of
transport investment and, in particular, the role of social cost benefit analysis
(SCBA);
• To review the role of transport investment in national and regional economic
development and, in particular, whether it has a special role to play in such
development;
• To review approaches for assessing regional economic and other distributional
effects.
These key issues have been broken down into a number of sub-questions, consistent with
chapters 2, 3 and 4 of this report. These sub-questions are detailed below.
1.1 National economic benefits
Three key questions were specified for this section:
• Question 2.1: In what circumstances, and to what extent, does a (fully-specified)
SCBA not capture all the national economic costs and benefits arising from a
transport investment?
• Question 2.2: What alternative approaches exist to assessing the national economic
impacts of transport investments and what are their merits in place of or to
supplement SCBA (particularly to capture any costs and benefits not adequately
addressed by SCBA)?
• Question 2.3: How should the impacts of transport investment on national economic
growth (GDP and similar measures) be assessed; and how do such assessment
methods and their outputs relate to the methods/outputs involved in the SCBA
approach?
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