On Measuring the Benefits of Lower Transport Costs

• Tác giả: Hanan G Jacoby
• Ngôn ngữ: eng
• Ký hiệu phân loại: 725.3 *Transportation and storage buildings
• Thông tin xuất bản: 2012
• Bộ sưu tập: Tài liệu truy cập mở
• ID: 296151
• Chủ đề: 1. Economic Development: Agriculture; 2. Energy; 3. Environment; 4. Microeconomic Analyses of Economic Development O120; 5. Natural Resources

Tóm tắt

Despite large amounts invested in rural roads in developing countries, little is known about their benefits. This paper derives an expression for the willingness-to-pay for a reduction in transport costs from the canonical agricultural household model and uses it to estimate the benefits of a hypothetical road project. Estimation is based on novel cross-sectional data collected in a small region of Madagascar with enormous, yet plausibly exogenous, variation in transport cost. A road that essentially eliminated transport costs in the study area would boost the incomes of the remotest households--those facing transport costs of about 5/ton --by nearly half, mostly by raising non-farm earnings. This benefit estimate is contrasted to one based on a hedonic approach.