EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

On measuring the benefits of lower transport costs

Hanan Jacoby and Bart Minten ()

No 4484, Policy Research Working Paper Series from The World Bank

Abstract: Despite large amounts invested in rural roads in developing countries, little is known about their benefits. This paper derives an expression for the willingness-to-pay for a reduction in transport costs from the canonical agricultural household model and uses it to estimate the benefits of a hypothetical road project. Estimation is based on novel cross-sectional data collected in a small region of Madagascar with enormous, yet plausibly exogenous, variation in transport cost. A road that essentially eliminated transport costs in the study area would boost the incomes of the remotest households-those facing transport costs of about USD 75/ton-by nearly half, mostly by raising non-farm earnings. This benefit estimate is contrasted to one based on a hedonic approach.

Keywords: Transport Economics Policy&Planning; Rural Roads&Transport; Economic Theory&Research; Rural Transport (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2008-01-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (14)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www-wds.worldbank.org/external/default/WDSC ... ered/PDF/wps4484.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: On measuring the benefits of lower transport costs (2009) 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:wbk:wbrwps:4484

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Policy Research Working Paper Series from The World Bank 1818 H Street, N.W., Washington, DC 20433. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Roula I. Yazigi ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-22
Handle: RePEc:wbk:wbrwps:4484