Rural Roads and Local Economic Development

Nearly one billion people worldwide live in rural areas without access to national paved road networks. We estimate the impacts of India’s $40 billion national rural road construction program using a fuzzy regression discontinuity design and comprehensive household and firm census microdata. Four years after road construction, the main effect of new feeder roads is to facilitate the movement of workers out of agriculture. However, there are no major changes in agricultural outcomes, income, or assets. Employment in village firms expands only slightly. Even with better market connections, remote areas may continue to lack economic opportunities. (JEL J43, O13, O18, R23, R42)

• Publication year

  2018

• Venue

  The American Economic Review

• Publication date

  2018-06-01

• Fields of study

  Geography, Economics

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1257/AER.20180268
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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