Within‐city roads and urban growth

P. Brandily and Ferdinand Rauch

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: In this paper we study the role of within-city roads layout in fostering city growth. Within-city roads networks have not been studied extensively in economics although they are essential to facilitate human interactions, which are at the core of agglomeration economies. We build and compute several simple measures of roads network and construct a sample of over 1800 cities and towns from Sub-Saharan Africa. Using a simple econometric model and two instrumental variable strategies based on the history of African cities, we then estimate the causal impact of within-city roads layout on urban growth. We find that over the recent decades, cities with greater road density and road evenness in the centre grew faster.

Keywords: urbanisation; road layout; Sub-Saharan Africa; urban planning; Global Research Program on Spatial Development of Cities; funded by the Multi Donor Trust Fund on Sustainable Urbanization of the World Bank (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: R00 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 29 pages
Date: 2024-09-30
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-net, nep-tre and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Published in Journal of Regional Science, 30, September, 2024, 64(4), pp. 1236 - 1264. ISSN: 0022-4146

Downloads: (external link)
http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/122580/ Open access version. (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ehl:lserod:122580

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library LSE Library Portugal Street London, WC2A 2HD, U.K.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by LSERO Manager ().