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This book was written because at the time when Development Partners focus especially on rural mobility, it is worth trying to know how to achieve better aid effectiveness in rural transport. So far, most Development Partners and governments in SSA have relied on two overarching assumptions, which have led to massive road investments: (i) most households in rural areas in Africa are not connected to markets and therefore need a road passable for a truck (all the more as they are remote), (ii) roads with high level of service are crucial to achieve high economic impact. We demonstrate in this bo

Rural roads --- Rural development --- Country roads --- Roads --- Rural roads - Africa, Sub-Saharan --- Rural roads - Africa, Sub-Saharan - Case studies --- Rural development - Africa, Sub-Saharan

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"The rationale for public investment in rural roads is that households can better exploit agricultural and nonagricultural opportunities to use labor and capital more efficiently. But significant knowledge gaps remain as to how opportunities provided by roads actually filter back into household outcomes and their distributional consequences. This paper examines the impacts of rural road projects using household-level panel data from Bangladesh. Rural road investments are found to reduce poverty significantly through higher agricultural production, higher wages, lower input and transportation costs, and higher output prices. Rural roads also lead to higher girls' and boys' schooling. Road investments are pro-poor, meaning the gains are proportionately higher for the poor than for the non-poor. "--World Bank web site.

Economic assistance, Domestic --- Public investments --- Rural roads --- Finance.

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The world's climate is changing. It is well recognized that technical standards and project specifications of public infrastructure have to be adjusted, depending on the climate. However, it is less recognized that the public infrastructure procurement also needs to be adjusted. This paper examines a particular case of rural road procurement in Nepal. Severe weather conditions, such as heavy rains and storms, are likely to interrupt civil works and wash away unpaved or gravel roads. It is found that heavy precipitation causes delays, but not cost overruns. The paper also shows that budgetary efficiency and credibility could be improved by taking climate conditions into account. If future precipitation were anticipated by backward-looking expectations, many large project delays could be avoided. If the autoregressive precipitation model were used, the vast majority of the observed delays could be eliminated.

Climate Change Mitigation and Green House Gases --- Global Environment Facility --- Macroeconomics and Economic Growth --- Public procurement --- Roads & Highways --- Rural Roads & Transport --- Rural roads, ex post contract adjustments, climate conditions --- Transport --- Transport Economics Policy & Planning

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Access to basic infrastructure services - roads, electricity, water, sanitation - and the efficient provision of the services, is a key challenge in the fight against poverty. Many of the poor (and particularly the extreme poor) in rural communities in Latin America live on average 5 kilometers or more from the nearest paved road, which is almost twice as far as non-poor rural households. There have been major improvements in access to water, sanitation, electricity, telecommunications, ports, and airports, but road coverage has not changed much, although some effort and resources have been invested to improve the quality of road networks. This paper focuses on the main determinants of logistics costs and physical access to services and, whenever possible, provides evidence of the effects of these determinants on competitiveness, growth, and poverty in Latin American economies. The analysis shows the impact of improving infrastructure and logistics costs on three fronts - macro (growth), micro (productivity at the firm level), and poverty (the earnings of poor/rural people). In addition, the paper provides recommendations and solutions that encompass a series of policies to reduce the prevalent high logistics costs and limited access to services in Latin America. The recommendations rely on applied economic analysis on logistics and trade facilitation.

Airports --- Environment --- Environmental Economics and Policies --- Freight --- Road --- Roads --- Rural Roads --- Sanitation --- Transport --- Transport Economics, Policy and Planning --- Transport services --- Transportation --- True

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Infrastructure investments are typically long-term. As a result, observed benefits to households and communities may vary considerably over time as short-term outcomes generate or are subsumed by longer-term impacts. This paper uses a new round of household survey as part of a local government engineering department's rural road improvement project financed by the World Bank in Bangladesh to compare the short-term and long-term effects of rural roads over eight years. A dynamic panel model, estimated by generalized method of moments, is applied to estimate the varying returns to public road investment accounting for time-varying unobserved characteristics. The results show that the substantial effects of roads on such outcomes as per capita expenditure, schooling, and prices as observed in the short run attenuate over time. But the declining returns are not common for all outcomes of interest or all households. Employment in the rural non-farm sector, for example, has risen more rapidly over time, indicating increasing returns to investment. The very poor have failed to sustain the short-term benefits of roads, and yet the gains accrued to the middle-income groups are strengthened over time because of changing sectors of employment, away from agriculture toward non-farm activity. The results also show that initial state dependence-or initial community and household characteristics as well as road quality-matters in estimating the trajectory of road impacts.

Agriculture --- Dynamic Panel Models --- Economic Theory & Research --- Housing & Human Habitats --- Rural Development --- Rural Infrastructure --- Rural Poverty Reduction --- Rural Roads & Transport --- Transport Economics Policy & Planning --- Welfare Impacts