| 21 January, Friday (11:00am-12:30pm) Session 5B: Infrastructure and Economic Activity |
Industrial Parks and Peri-Urban Development: Preliminary Evidence from India
Author/s: Rana Hasan, Yi Jiang, Milan Thomas
This paper utilizes information on the location of industrial parks, nighttime lights (NTL) data, and the structure of economic activity at the subdistrict level to examine the local economic impact of industrial parks. We focus on industrial parks located in peri-urban areas and attempt to understand the conditions under which industrial parks encourage structural transformation in neighboring locations. Our initial analysis shows that industrial parks are correlated with greater local economic activity as captured by NTL, even after adjusting for baseline luminosity. Further analysis that controls for IP characteristics, including their ownership structure, size, and age; and subdistrict characteristics, such as the nature of local government units (i.e., whether municipalities or villages) and how diversified economic activity is, will shed greater light the conditions under which industrial parks can serve as a catalyst for structural transformation of the local economy.
JEL codes: O14, O18, O25