Infrastructure policy in the USA-Mexico border: Evaluation and policy perspectives

This paper presents a case study of road infrastructure and its impact on accessibility and industrial productivity on the USA-Mexico border. The paper focuses on the analysis of three networks of projects that were presented in Protego (2007), a report prepared for the 35th US-Mexico Border Governors Conference in 2007. These projects comprise a series of local and interregional roads located in the western, central, and eastern areas of the border region. The analytical work uses the North American Road System Model (NARS), a GIS application to assess the effect of the infrastructure improvements on accessibility at different geographic scales. The impact of these accessibility gains on industrial productivity is also estimated. The results of the paper confirm the importance of road infrastructure in this region. They indicate that the productivity gains that can attributed to accessibility improvements are large enough to pay for the cost of new infrastructure during the life span of the project.