Ports and Local Development: Evidence from Italy

The role of infrastructure as an engine of growth and development of countries and regions is now widely accepted by scholars in the field. Among the various types of transport infrastructure, ports are considered as particularly strategic because of the increasing importance of maritime transport in connecting territories. In this paper we study the impact of ports on Italian provinces. To this end, we assume that sectoral employment is a function of a series of controls and of maritime traffic. We extend this framework to take account of selection bias as well, finding that the elasticity of service sector employment to maritime traffic is about 0.02