Economic and Political Factors in Infrastructure Investment: Evidence from Railroads and Roads in Africa 1960--2015

Remi Jedwab and Adam Storeygard

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

Abstract: Transport investment has played an important role in the economic development of many countries. Starting from a low base, African countries have recently initiated several massive transportation infrastructure projects. However, surprisingly little is known about the current levels, past evolution, and correlates of transportation infrastructure in Africa. In this paper, we introduce a new data set on the evolution of the stocks of railroads (1862-2015) and multiple types of roads (1960-2015) for 43 sub-Saharan African countries. First, we compare our estimates with those from other available data sets, such as the World Development Indicators of the World Bank. Second, we document the aggregate evolution of transportation investments over the past century in Africa. We confirm that railroads were a ``colonial'' transportation technology, whereas paved roads were a ``post-colonial'' technology. We also highlight how investment patterns have followed economic patterns. Third, we report conditional correlations between 5-year infrastructure growth and several geographic, economic and political factors during the period 1960-2015. We find strong correlations between transportation investments and economic development as well as more political factors including pre-colonial centralization, ethnic fractionalization, European settlement, natural resource dependence, and democracy.

Keywords: Transportation Infrastructure; Public Investment; Railroads; Roads; Paved Roads; Africa; Growth; Institutions; Comparative Development; Economic History (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H54 N47 N77 N97 O11 O18 O20 R11 R12 R40 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019-09
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www2.gwu.edu/~iiep/assets/docs/papers/2019WP/JedwabIIEP2019-9.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Economic and Political Factors in Infrastructure Investment: Evidence from Railroads and Roads in Africa 1960–2015 (2019)
Working Paper: Economic and Political Factors in Infrastructure Investment: Evidence from Railroads and Roads in Africa 1960–2015 (2017)
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:2019-9

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 ().