No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the authors.
Priority Roads: The Political Economy of Africa's Interior-to-Coast Roads
... We rely on this literature, which highlights the motivation of political leaders to build roads to extend their capacity to govern, to construct our instrumental variable for proximity to the road networks. In so doing, we follow a large literature that shows that non-economic factors play determining roles in the propensity of African governments to invest in the construction of public infrastructure (Bonfatti et al., 2019;Jedwab and Storeygard, 2021;Burgess et al., 2015;Herbst, 2014). In constructing our instrumental variable, we assume that African leaders would built roads to facilitate territorial administration by easing the movement of administration officials and military troops from the capital power center to the rest of the country, and from one location to another (Herbst, 2014;Muller-Crepon et al., 2020). ...
Evidence for road expansion and electrification as drivers of job creation is limited and mixed, with most studies having considered either one or the other, and only in isolation. This paper estimates the average and heterogeneous impacts of road and electricity investments and the interaction of the two on job creation over the past two decades in 27 countries of sub-Saharan Africa. Exploiting the exogenous location of ancestral ethnic homelands, a new instrumental variable is created for road accessibility, inspired by post-independence leaders' agenda of building roads to extend authority over the entire expanse of their country, and to promote nation building. Topography and lightning strike---a key source of damage to electric lines and disruption of service---are used to instrument electricity supply. The paper finds positive and significant effects on employment from enhancing proximity to roads and to electric grids. Moreover, the interaction of the two enhances the effects, making them complementary investments. The impacts of both individual and bundled investments are positive, but with differences between men and women, workers of various ages, and countries at different stages of development. In urban areas, better access to roads and electricity promotes all types of employment. In rural areas, greater access induces a transition from low- to high-skilled occupations. These differential effects suggest that the structural transformation brought about by road and electricity expansion is primarily a rural phenomenon.
Recent research suggests that poor economic integration and isolation from regional and international markets have contributed
significantly to poverty in Sub-Saharan Africa. Poor transport infrastructure and border restrictions are major deterrents
to trade expansion which would stimulate economic growth and poverty reduction. Using spatial network analysis techniques
and gravity trade model estimations, this paper quantifies the economics of upgrading a primary road network that connects
the major urban areas in the region. The results indicate that continental network upgrading is worth serious consideration
from an economic perspective. Our simulations suggest that overland trade among Sub-Saharan African countries might expand
by about 20 billion for initial upgrading and $1 billion annually for maintenance.
Using theory, case studies, and cross-country evidence, we investigate the factors behind the concentration of a nation's
urban population in a single city. High tariffs, high costs of internal trade, and low levels of international trade increase
the degree of concentration. Even more clearly, politics (such as the degree of instability) determines urban primacy. Dictatorships
have central cities that are, on average, 50 percent larger than their democratic counterparts. Using information about the
timing of city growth, and a series of instruments, we conclude that the predominant causality is from political factors to
urban concentration, not from concentration to political change.