No abstract
A rationale for public investment in rural roads is that households can better exploit agricultural and nonagricultural opportunities to employ labor and capital more efficiently. Significant knowledge gaps persist, however, as to how opportunities provided by roads actually filter back into household outcomes as well as distributional consequences. This study examines the impacts of two rural road-paving projects in Bangladesh using a new quasi-experimental household panel data set surveying project and control villages before and after program implementation. A household panel fixed-effects methodology controlling for initial area conditions is used to estimate the impact of paved roads on household and individual outcomes and account for potential bias in program placement at the village level. Rural road investments are found to reduce poverty significantly through higher agricultural production, lower input and transportation costs, and higher agricultural output prices at local village markets. Rural road development has also led to higher secondary schooling enrollment for boys and girls, as compared to primary school enrollment. We find that road investments have also benefited the poor, meaning the gains are significant for the poor and in some cases disproportionately higher than for the nonpoor. (c) 2009 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved..
The Policy Research Working Paper Series disseminates the findings of work in progress to encourage the exchange of ideas about development issues. An objective of the series is to get the findings out quickly, even if the presentations are less than fully polished. The papers carry the names of the authors and should be cited accordingly. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed in this paper are entirely those of the authors. They do not necessarily represent the views of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development/World Bank and its affiliated organizations, or those of the Executive Directors of the World Bank or the governments they represent.
We know surprisingly little about the long-run impacts of household electrification. This paper studies the impacts on consumption in rural India over a 17-year period, allowing for both internal and external (villagelevel) effects. Under our identifying assumptions, electrification brought significant consumption gains for households who acquired electricity for their own use. We also find evidence of a dynamic effect of village connectivity for households without electricity themselves. This is suggestive of an external effect, which also comes with a shift in consumption spending suggestive of status concerns among those still without electricity. Labor earnings were an important channel of impact. This was mainly through extra work by men. There was no effect on average wage rates.
Improving agricultural productivity has received a greater attention in recent years amid concerns about rising food insecurity, population pressures, and climate change. Many believe that better access to institutional credit, spanning microcredit as well as commercial and agricultural banks, can help rural households smooth risks, and access inputs and other technology to modernize agriculture and improve farm/nonfarm linkages. We use recently augmented household panel data spanning over 20 years in Bangladesh to examine the effects of rural credit expansion (both microcredit and formal bank channels) on outcomes for agricultural households. We find that microcredit has benefited households with lower landownings, raising agricultural income from activities such as livestock rearing that require less land, as well as nonfarm income diversification for all households, but with the strongest effect for landless or near-landless households. We do not find effects of microcredit on crop income, but do, however, find that reported supply-side credit constraints significantly lower crop income. Borrowing by both men and women has contributed to nonfarm income growth for marginal farmers, but only men's borrowing has contributed to nonfarm income growth among higher landowning groups.JEL classifications: G21, O13
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