Obstacles on the Road to Palestinian Economic Growth
This paper quantifies the impact of market access on local GDP in the West Bank, proxied by nighttime lights, using the deployment of road closure obstacles by the Israeli army between 2005 and 2012 as a quasi-natural experiment generating exogenou...
| Main Authors: | , , , |
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| Format: | Working Paper |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
World Bank, Washington, DC
2018
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/135611522172009978/Obstacles-on-the-road-to-Palestinian-economic-growth http://hdl.handle.net/10986/29565 |
| Summary: | This paper quantifies the impact of
market access on local GDP in the West Bank, proxied by
nighttime lights, using the deployment of road closure
obstacles by the Israeli army between 2005 and 2012 as a
quasi-natural experiment generating exogenous temporal and
spatial variation in accessibility. Minimum travel times
between locality pairs are computed using road network and
obstacles data supplemented with information on checkpoint
traversal times. These are combined with population data to
construct a time-varying market access measure for each
locality. Market access has a significant and substantial
effect on local light emissions. This association is robust
to controlling for conflict, and strengthens when market
access is instrumented by the number of obstacles located in
a radius between 10 and 25km away from the locality. |
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