Measuring the spatial economic impact of the Maputo Development Corridor

Years after being launched, the Maputo Development Corridor (MDC) is still facing a number of socio-economic challenges. Prominent amongst these are its failure to create adequate employment opportunities; a top-down functional approach which excludes ordinary citizens; and an unfocused management approach. The MDC also suffers from a lack of clarity on key conceptual issues such as the economic influence exerted by its nodes along the corridor and the width of its economic influence away from the spine of the corridor. This study empirically establishes the influence of nodes along the MDC and ascertains the statistical significance of the impact of the corridor over distance away from its spine. ArcGIS, standard statistical analyses and multivariate regression analysis are used to determine the relative impact of nodes on subsets of the corridor along that corridor as well as the width of its impact at various distances away from the N4 spine.