Are Schooling and Roads Complementary? Evidence from Income Dynamics in Rural Indonesia

Unpacking the Meaning of ‘Market Access’: Evidence from Rural Kenya

“…In particular, lowered costs of discovery and exchange of information, negotiation, and monitoring make it possible for traders to penetrate further into remote areas than they had previously been willing to do. In addition to highlighting the potential importance of new information and communication technologies as mediating factors in access to markets, Overå's study suggests two important aspects of access which would merit further theoretical elaboration: first, some of the fixed costs of transacting may have strong spatial expressions (i.e., increasing with remoteness); second, there may be important interaction effects between different types of infrastructure (a point echoed by Escobal and Torero's (2005) study of public asset complementarities; see also Yamauchi, Muto, Chowdhury, Dewina, and Sumaryanto (2011)). Related to the first point, in a recent paper, Stifel and Minten (2008) evaluate the impact of remoteness in rural Madagascar on food crop productivity and market participation.…”

PROTOCOL: The effects of road infrastructure, and transport and logistics services interventions on women's participation in informal and formal labour markets in low‐ and middle‐income countries: a systematic review

“…Similarly, several systematic reviews have measured the effectiveness of gender-responsive social and economic interventions on women's empowerment. There are reviews on the effectiveness of money transfers, in cash and/or in kind, as well as those on land ownership, microfinancing, and business training interventions on women's empowerment (Brody et al, 2015;Dekker, 2013;Yoong et al, 2012;Vaessen et al, 2012;Stewart et al, 2010). On road infrastructure, the impact of rural road extensions has been reviewed (Hine et al, 2016), but the review did not include sex-disaggregated outcomes for women and girls.…”

“…Overall, the research findings demonstrate that mixed interventions (economic skills and services alongside life skills and other training services) appear to be effective from women's economic empowerment perspective (Taylor et al, 2014). On the other hand, stand-alone interventions, such as, financial services have a positive impact on women's economic empowerment (Brody et al, 2015;Dekker, 2013;Yoong et al, 2012), but have a limited impact or no effect on female bargaining power in the household, on feminine needs-based goods or for children-related ones, or even female health outcomes (Taylor et al, 2014;Vaessen et al, 2012;Stewart et al, 2010).…”

Trains, Trade and Transaction Costs: How Does Domestic Trade by Rail Affect Market Prices of Malawi Agricultural Commodities?

“…Several contributions on the impact of road infrastructure are worth discussing: the impact of road infrastructure on labour markets (and education) is investigated for the US (Michaels, 2008) and Indonesia (Yamauchi et al, 2011), and on food collection, trade margins and traders' wages for Zaire (Minten and Kyle, 1999). Michaels uses the advent of the US Interstate Highway System, construction of which began in 1956 and was completed in 1975, as "a source of exogenous variation in trade barriers" to show an increase in trucking activity and retail sales of 7-10 percentage points, in connected relative to non-connected rural counties.…”

“…Opening up to trade is not likely to explain a great deal of variation in the demand for skills. Identification -the key empirical challenge in measuring impacts of infrastructure -is covered by using (quality) improvements in road quality in Yamauchi et al (2011). Combining household panel and village census data for Indonesia for the period 1995-2007 they measure the impact of improved connectivity on household income growth and nonagricultural labour supply.…”