We present the relationships between the development of the transport infrastructure and population change or economic growth at the provincial level. New explanations on regional contrasts of development on the long term will arise from this analysis. This proposal of linking databases in a GIS will check a methodology for ...
(Show more)We present the relationships between the development of the transport infrastructure and population change or economic growth at the provincial level. New explanations on regional contrasts of development on the long term will arise from this analysis. This proposal of linking databases in a GIS will check a methodology for the study of the territorial imbalances in the Iberian Peninsula or any other area as Europe.
The context of this research is that the construction of a rail network was a fundamental component of the process of integration by linking the diverse regional societies and economies in Spain and Portugal. Trains increased the speed and decreased the cost of moving people and goods. Trains, by making freight transport more efficient, enlarged markets and thus changed the market strategy of companies. By making passenger transport faster and cheaper they expanded both national and international travel, which contributed to broadening the social and cultural horizons of an ever wider section of the population.
The main goal of this presentation is to show the importance to create new integrated pan-European digital datasets and to analyse these resources to underpin a narrative of the role of transport in long-run European population and economic activity distribution. The new datasets will consist in a unified GIS of Europe’s developing transport infrastructure together with other social, economic and demographic variables. This GIS will contribute to create a new empirical basis for the analysis of long-run European integration. This can only be achieved by spatially integrating datasets of economic, social and demographic variables with transport infrastructure datasets.
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