Geographic redistribution and major government investments

In this report, we discuss the role of geographical distributional effects in the decision basis for large government investments. This can also be linked to the objectives of regional policy. We show how accessibility, for example to workplaces and services, can be used to quantify both existing geographical inequality and the distributional effects of interventions with scientific rigor. Furthermore, we look at the importance of geographical equity considerations in nine previous ex-ante evaluations of major public projects. We find that such considerations rarely play an explicit role in the reports, but that they could have played an important role if they had been dealt with more systematically.