This report examines the impact of rural connectivity on poverty, access to basic services, and income in Armenia, a country which has found itself in a low-growth, low-investment nexus, with stalled poverty reduction. This study attempts to shed light on the linkages between transport and poverty in Armenia. The rest of the report is structured as follows: Section 1 explains the evolution of selected social, economic, and demographic indicators for Armenia during the analysis period
Section 2 lays out the conceptual framework for operationalizing shared prosperity and poverty in rural transport operations
Section 3 proposes a systematic but non-exhaustive collection of literature on rural road impact studies in low- and middle-income countries
Section 4 examines regional gaps in accessibility to markets and services which were computed with the use of the first geographic information system (GIS) based mapping platform of its kind in Armenia, and introduces the potential association between accessibility and poverty in Armenia
Section 5 characterizes key social and economic indicators in the project's immediate area of influence to then summarize household-level outcomes obtained from a comprehensive qualitative analysis and community-level findings resulting from a nighttime lights analysis
and Section 6 summarizes the lessons learnt and the directions for future research. The report concludes with policy implications from this research and directions for future analytical and operational work on transport and poverty in Armenia.