Title: Transport infrastructure, oil prices, and economic growth: a bootstrap ARDL approach with a Fourier function

Authors: Cheng-Feng Wu; Youqin Pan

Addresses: The School of Business Administration Hubei University of Economics, Wuhan, Hubei Province, 430205, China; School of Business, Wuchang University of Technology, Wuhan, Hubei Province, China; Research Center of Hubei Logistics Development, Hubei University of Economics, Wuhan, Hubei Province, China ' Department of Marketing and Decision Science, Salem State University, 352 Lafayette Street, Salem, MA, 01970, USA

Abstract: This study explores the nexus between transportation infrastructure and economic growth, controlling for the oil price in China. By applying a bootstrap autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) with a Fourier function (ARDLF) on data during the period of 1980-2019, the novel ARDLF procedure confirms the existence of cointegration between the modes (road, rail, air and water) and economic growth. This study demonstrates that feedback causality exists between transport infrastructure (rail and air) and economic growth and one-way causality exists between the variables in road and water transport. More importantly, the impact of oil prices on economic growth varies across transport modes. The results of the study suggest that oil hedging and efficient transport modes should be promoted in the short run, and energy transition is needed for sustainable development in the long run. However, this trend may not hold due to the Covid-19 pandemic and the resulted economic recession.

Keywords: transport infrastructure; cointegration; Fourier approximation; GDP; gross domestic product; oil price.

DOI: 10.1504/IJDS.2021.122774

International Journal of Data Science, 2021 Vol.6 No.4, pp.292 - 309

Received: 29 Sep 2021
Accepted: 08 Nov 2021
Published online: 10 May 2022 *

Full-text access for editors Full-text access for subscribers Purchase this article Comment on this article