Socioeconomic Assessment on Infrastructure Project

The People's Republic of China, where the total land area is about 9,600 thousands square kilometers and the population exceeds 1.2 billion, has tremendous potential for development. In spite of the financial crisis greatly affecting East Asian countries, the annual GDP growth rate of China has shown remarkable figures However, to sustain her long and steady development, it is inevitable to enhance the social infrastructure and to invest a huge amount of money on it. Especially, the transportation is one of the most fundamental infrastructures, without which well-balanced nationwide development could not be achieved. In view of the vast land area and the huge population of China, the amount of the necessary investment could be very large although the resource for the investment is, as a matter of course, not limitless. In this context, to execute an elaborate socioeconomic assessment on each infrastructure project is crucially important, although it is not easy to do so especially on a large-scale project such as the ‘Development of the Western Area'. The main purpose of this paper is to stress the necessity of the socioeconomic assessment and of the intensive studies on the problems of the assessment, but not to elaborate the methodology of the assessment.