The Golden Quadrilateral, a highway network connecting many of the major industrial, agricultural and cultural centres of India, has caused an increase in real income per year at the rate of 2.04, according to a grant-winning research conducted by a faculty member at Georgetown University in Qatar (GU-Q).
The exercise by assistant professor of economics Dr Jose Asturias, which sought to study how economic competition changes after new transportation infrastructure is built and ultimately how this affects income in the country, was presented at the university’s regular Faculty Research Colloquium on campus.
Working with his research partners, Manuel Garcia-Santana from Pompeu Fabra University and Roberto Ramos from the Bank of Spain, Dr Asturias looked at 29 different Indian states to compile data from 200 manufacturing plants that have more than 95% of sales shares, compared the cost of transportation of the goods produced by those plants before and after the construction of the new highway system using complex economic models, and predicted the economic outcomes using a supercomputer at Texas A&M University at Qatar.
“Our model predicted that in India, the impact of this new infrastructure has caused an increase in real income per year at the rate of 2.04. That means that the calculated annual benefits of the road project is an increase of $3.15bn per year. That’s a pretty good return for an investment of $5.6bn, the cost of building this highway network connecting many of the major industrial, agricultural and cultural centres of India.”
Speaking to the audience of students and interested faculty, Dr Asturias said that importance of the research findings go well beyond the Indian context. “Transportation costs are particularly high in developing countries. In the US it is 10%, and in India it is high at around 45%. This can have a tremendous impact on competition, market efficiency and ultimately worker welfare. This model and our findings can be used by policy makers worldwide to capture gains that normal models
do not.”
For the students at the Education City institution, such research is also an important way to learn about core economic issues. Dr Asturias maintained that he tries to incorporate his own research in the classroom.  
“I teach Macro courses here, so at the end of the semester I usually talk about some of my own research and show the students that the theory that we learn in class can be used to tackle a wide range of very interesting questions.”
The funding for the research project came from research support provided by GU-Q as well as a grant from the Private Enterprise Development in Low Income Countries, a joint research initiative of the UK government’s Department for International Development and the Centre for Economic Policy Research, an important and widely recognised organisation of European
economists based in the UK.
The largest highway project in India and the fifth longest in the world, the Golden Quadrilateral, launched in 2001 and completed in 2012, is the first phase of the National Highways Development Project, and consists of 5,846km four/six lane express highways.
A quadrilateral of sorts is formed by connecting Chennai, Kolkata, Delhi and Mumbai, and hence its name. Other metropolises also connected by the network are Ahmedabad, Bengaluru, Bhubaneswar, Jaipur, Kanpur, Pune, Surat, Guntur, Vijayawada, and Visakhapatnam.