The Impact of Ethiopia’s Road Investment Program on Economic Development and Land Use : Evidence from Satellite Data
This paper studies the impacts of the large-scale Road Sector Development Program in Ethiopia between 1997 and 2016 on local economic activity and land cover (urbanization and cropland). It exploits spatial and temporal variation in road upgrades a...
| Main Authors: | , , , , |
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| Format: | Working Paper |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
World Bank, Washington, DC
2022
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/099332404062230683/IDU073a7158605532046490b712098aed9008539 http://hdl.handle.net/10986/37280 |
| Summary: | This paper studies the impacts of the
large-scale Road Sector Development Program in Ethiopia
between 1997 and 2016 on local economic activity and land
cover (urbanization and cropland). It exploits spatial and
temporal variation in road upgrades across Ethiopia,
together with high-resolution panel data derived from
satellite imagery. The findings show that road upgrades
contributed to increases in local economic activity, as
proxied by nighttime lights and urban land area. However,
there is significant heterogeneity in the results across
baseline levels of economic activity. Specifically, gains
from road upgrades are concentrated in areas with
moderate-to-high initial levels of economic activity. By
contrast, there was little, or even negative, growth in
areas with low levels of initial economic activity. Finally,
the findings show that road upgrades contributed to a
reduction in cropland in areas with medium-to-high baseline
nighttime lights. The results suggest that Ethiopia's
ambitious road infrastructure development program overall
increased local economic activity and urbanization, but that
it also had important distributional implications that need
to be taken into account when planning such infrastructure programs. |
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