EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

The Average and Heterogeneous Effects of Transportation Investments: Evidence from sub-Saharan Africa 1960-2010

Remi Jedwab and Adam Storeygard

Working Papers from The George Washington University, Institute for International Economic Policy

Abstract: Previous work on transportation investments has focused on average impacts in high- and middle-income countries. We estimate average and heterogeneous effects in a poor continent, Africa, using roads and cities data spanning 50 years in 39 countries. Using changes in market access due to distant road construction as a source of exogenous variation, we estimate an 30-year elasticity of city population with respect to market access of 0.06--0.18. Our results suggest that this elasticity is stronger for small and remote cities, and weaker in politically favored and agriculturally suitable areas. Access to foreign cities matters little.

Keywords: Transportation Infrastructure; Paved Roads; Urbanization; Cities; Africa; Market Access; Trade Costs; Highways; Internal Migration; Heterogeneity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F15 F16 O18 O20 R11 R12 R4 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019-08
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (11)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www2.gwu.edu/~iiep/assets/docs/papers/2019WP/JedwabIIEP2019-8.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: The Average and Heterogeneous Effects of Transportation Investments: Evidence from Sub-Saharan Africa 1960–2010 (2022) Downloads
Working Paper: The Average and Heterogeneous Effects of Transportation Investments: Evidence from Sub-Saharan Africa 1960-2010 (2020) Downloads
Working Paper: The Average and Heterogeneous Effects of Transportation Investments: Evidence from sub-Saharan Africa 1960-2010 (2017) Downloads
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:gwi:wpaper:2019-8

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from The George Washington University, Institute for International Economic Policy Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Kyle Renner (iiep@gwu.edu).

 
Page updated 2025-01-23
Handle: RePEc:gwi:wpaper:2019-8