 Rural road improvement and individual health in ChinaTao Bu, Daisheng Tang, Zheng Zhang and Chengkai Jiang Journal of Asian Economics, 2025, vol. 98, issue C Abstract: It is crucial to investigate the effects of improving rural transportation infrastructure on the health of rural populations. This study establishes a multiple equilibrium model between transportation networks and rural health capital. Based on the data of rural road construction in China and the data of China Health and Nutrition Survey from 2000 to 2015, the OLS and FRD methods with year and individual fixed effects were used to analyze the impact of rural roads on the health status of rural labor force. The study found that rural road connectivity significantly improved laborers’ health, particularly for female, middle-aged and agricultural laborers. The key mechanism of this study is to promote public economic development and individual health investment, health literacy, and time allocation. There is a significant complementary effect between transportation investments and health investments, along with a substitution effect between work and leisure. Our theoretical and empirical findings highlight the importance of last-mile road construction in remote rural areas for improving rural health capital in developing countries. Keywords: Rural roads; Health investment; Health knowledge; Time allocation; Health capital (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:asieco:v:98:y:2025:i:c:s1049007825000326 DOI: 10.1016/j.asieco.2025.101908 Access Statistics for this article Journal of Asian Economics is currently edited by C. Wiemer More articles in Journal of Asian Economics from Elsevier |
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