Does power grid infrastructure stimulate regional economic growth?

Highlights: • Long term elasticity of power grid on economy is greater than the short term. • Power grid boosts economy by power supply effect and investment effect. • Power grid stimulate new power demand and employment. • Power import and balance regions gain more from power grid investment. • Affected by power grid, power export regions may be trapped in the resource curse. What are the effects of power grid infrastructure investment on the regional economy, and what explains these effects? This paper uses the restricted profit model and a seemingly unrelated regression (SUR) to estimate the short-term and long-term effects of power grid infrastructure on regional economic growth in 30 provinces in China from 1998 to 2017. Our results show that (1) power grid infrastructure investment has a significant positive effect on regional economic growth; (2) the associated long-term impact on the economy is greater than the short-term impact; (3) regions with high energy demands and good industry fundation benefit more from power grid infrastructure in the long term; (4) the output elasticity of power-importing and balancing regions maintained an upward trend after an electricity shortage problem had been solved, while the elasticity in power-exporting regions was positive but steadily decreased because of the resource curse effect. This paper suggests that in the current stage, the power grid infrastructure is a good policy tool to drive regional economies. However, there are differences in investment priorities among different regions.