Choosing rural road investments to help reduce poverty.
By Dominique van de Walle. 2002
270 citations recorded by the source corpus.
The author examines how rural road investment projects should be selected and appraised when the objective is poverty reduction. After critically reviewing past and current practices, the author develops an operational approach grounded in a public economics framework in which concerns of equity and efficiency are inseparable, information is incomplete in important ways, and resources are limited. She addresses a key problem: that an important share of the benefits to the poor from rural roads cannot be measured in monetary terms. The selction formula she proposes aims to identify places where poverty and economic potential are high and access is low. She illustrates the method using data for and project experience in Vietnam. Among the advantages of proceeding as outlined in her proposal: This approach holds the hope of building capacity and is participatory; it extracts local information that may not be readily available to the central government; and it appears to be feasible because it relies on local authorities participating in the appraisal of subprojects.
Subfields: Economics and Econometrics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1842951c7c850d90e240f484d07ab1335b11377b
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In Economics and Econometrics
Citations in the corpus
- The Poverty Impact of Rural Roads: Evidence from Bangladesh (2006, unknown): “Similarly, van de Walle (2002) proposes a diversified, operational approach to measuring the benefits of rural roads, where social welfare from a road is maximized with respect to the total cost of all proposed links, with reliance on community authorities and local residents in project appraisal.”
- Transport Policies and Development (2015, background): “This occurs at the detriment of investment in places where the return could have been greater, or that could have a greater poverty-reduction impact (for example, in light of the ‘pro-poor’ effect of rural feeder roads, see Jacoby, 2000; van de Walle, 2002).”
- Cities, Territories, and Inclusive Growth: Unraveling Urban–Rural Linkages in Chile, Colombia, and Mexico (2015, background): “Investment in information communication technology tends to be decided on the basis of cost-benefit criteria (Van de Walle, 1997).”
- Isolation and agricultural productivity (2008, unknown): “While van de Walle (2002) and 2 insecurity.”
- Evaluating Anti-Poverty Programs (2005, unknown): “Using a different approach to testing NX methods, van de Walle (2002) gives an example for rural road evaluation in which a naïve comparison of the incomes of villages that have a rural road with those that do not indicates large income gains when in fact there are none.”
- Road Development, Economic Growth, and Poverty Reduction in China: (2005, background): “Xian and Sheng (2001) World Bank (2001) Poverty incidence Poverty incidence Share of national total 1998 1988 1996 1988 1996 North 15.”