Do rural roads create pathways out of poverty? Evidence from India

By S. Aggarwal. Journal of Development Economics, 2018

322 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Nearly a third of the world's rural population does not live near a paved road, and it is widely believed that this limits their access to economic opportunities. Using a natural experiment that led to plausibly exogenous variation in the timing and placement of paved roads in Indian villages, this paper provides evidence on the impact of roads on a wide variety of economic outcomes in rural areas. I find evidence consistent with 5 main effects in the village economy. Households in treatment areas report (a) lower prices and (b) increased availability of non-local goods, suggesting greater market integration. Reduced-form evidence suggests that changes in market access caused rural households to (c) increase the use of agricultural technologies, and (d) pull teenaged members out of school to join the labor force. Finally, evidence points to (e) enrollment gains for younger children.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Safety Research, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d037986e1b60a799a1c9604651df01cd3886a13f

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Citations in the corpus

Does Non-farm Income Affect Food Security? Evidence from India (2019, background): “Table A4: First-stage estimates: Non-Farm Income and Instruments (1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6) Share village with roads −0.”
COVID‐19 and Supply Chain Disruption: Evidence from Food Markets in India† (2020, background): “…restrictions on movements can lead to disruptions in food supply chains and eventually reduce production, and adversely affect food security (FAO 2020). developing country context where food supply chains are long and fragile (Reardon et al. 2020 and Aggarwal 2018), and millions live under poverty.”
Rural road infrastructure & agricultural production: Evidence from India (2021, background): “5 ployment in the manufacturing sector (Gertler et al., 2016) and farmland cultivated under hybrids at the district level (Aggarwal, 2015).”
Expressways, GDP, and the environment: The case of China (2020, background): “…(2007), Michaels (2008), Datta (2012), Duranton and Turner (2012), Duranton et al. (2014) , Donaldson and Hornbeck (2016), Frye (2016), Ghani et al. ( 2016), Jaworski and Kitchens (2016), Alder (2017), Aggarwal (2018), Asher and Novosad (2018), Okoye et al. (2019), and Donaldson (forthcoming).”