Road Infrastructure and Enterprise Dynamics in Ethiopia

Moving out of the bottom of the economy? Constraints to firm transition in the Indian informal manufacturing sector

“…Some studies have used measures of market accessibility such as access to transport and distance, cost and travel time to the main market as proxies for location, and examined their impact on firm growth. Shiferaw et al (2013) find a positive relationship between the quality of transport infrastructure and enterprise performance in Ethiopia. The positive productivity effects of market accessibility for firms are also found for Spain (Holl 2012), the UK (Rice et al 2006) and India (Lall et al 2004).…”

“…The coefficient of DISTANCE is significant and negative in all specifications, indicating that graduation of firms to bigger sizes decreases with increase in the distance of the district from the state capital. Our results thus suggest that reduction in transport costs captured through lesser distance and better transport infrastructure is very important for firm transition as firms tend to benefit from reduced factor costs, increased access to specialised labour, and general agglomeration economies (Shiferaw et al 2013).…”

“…Available evidence point to a strong positive relationship between access to infrastructure and firm growth and productivity (Bigsten and Gebreeyesus 2007;Dollar et al 2005). Some scholars established this relationship using access to electricity as a proxy for infrastructure (Rijkers et al 2010) and some using road accessibility as an indicator of infrastructure (Shiferaw et al 2013). There is overwhelming evidence at the firm level that human capital embodied in the owner of a firm or its workers (generally measured in terms of years of education, age or experience) promotes firm growth (Mead and Liedholm 1998;Van der Sluis et al 2005;McPherson and Rous 2010).…”

Demand and supply side factors for accelerating varietal turnover: An evidence from soybean in India

“…The difficulty, however, is in the grossly inadequate supply of seed to farmers; an estimate shows that only 50 percent of the total requirement of 70,000 tons is met from all the sources, and out of this only two-fifths is supplied by government sources (Goyal 2014). This lack of seed availability obviously has the direct effect of discouraging a shift to new improved varieties; several studies show that non-availability of required seed stands in the way of adoption of newer varieties (Simtowe et al 2011;Shiferaw, Kebede, You 2008;Shiferaw 2015;Larsen 2019). The conspicuous lack of private sector varieties in the list of farmer-used varieties shows that there is practically no role for the sector in soybean breeding efforts; several studies show that this lack can hamper farmer choice in varietal turnover (Simtowe et al 2011;Kosarek, Garcia, Morris 2001).…”

Ethiopia's Growth Acceleration and How to Sustain It—insights from a Cross-Country Regression Model

“…See column (6) of AnnexTable A.2.19 As our original data set only covered roads data until 2007 in Ethiopia, we replaced this data using national sources. 20 For a firm-level analysis showing the positive effect of road infrastructure on firm location choice and startup size in Ethiopia, seeShiferaw et al (2013).…”