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El miércoles 24 de junio, a las 14 horas, se llevará a cabo el seminario titulado Do all roads lead to Montevideo? Expansion of Railways and their impact on regional productive development in Uruguay between 1870 and 1952, a cargo de Matías Sena.
La actividad se llevará a cabo en modalidad presencial en el salón 4 de la FCEA. Como es habitual, se compartirá un café durante el encuentro.
Resumen
The study examines whether Uruguay's railway expansion (1870–1952) drove sustained regional economic growth and reduced inequality across a period spanning the agro-export model, early import-substitution industrialisation, and the transition from private concessions to state nationalisation (1948) and a public monopoly (1952).
Using a novel department-by-year panel built from railway company reports and state accounts, I construct a composite Railway Infrastructure Index and a market-access measure based on minimum travel times. Since departmental GDP per capita is only observed in benchmark years, I apply spatiotemporal imputation to recover a consistent annual panel.
The empirical strategy estimates railway effects on departmental GDP per capita levels and on convergence relative to Montevideo, combining two-way fixed effects, a heterogeneous spatial Durbin model, and an instrumental-variables approach using least-cost paths to address endogenous network placement.
Railways raised average regional income in an economically meaningful and robust way. Convergence effects, however, are weaker and
method-dependent, concentrated in 1870–1887 rather than persistent. The central finding is heterogeneity: railways produced clear local winners and losers, suggesting that network design and initial conditions shaped the distribution of gains even when average development effects were positive.
