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Rural roads --- Traffic safety --- Safety measures --- Planning.

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India's rural roads program, Pradhan Mantri Gram Sadak Yojana, aims to draw villagers into the mainstream by improving not only their terms of trade, but also their educational attainments and health. Treating each all-weather feeder road as an isolated element within the larger network, and using shadow prices to value the main components of costs and benefits, the paper demonstrates that further investments in the program are, with high probability, socially profitable, especially in poorer and more densely settled regions. Taking the entire set of new individual roads together, qualitative arguments suggest that their external and spill-over effects on the system as a whole probably generate some net additional benefits, but of very uncertain magnitude.

Economic Theory & Research --- Environmental Economics & Policies --- Health Monitoring & Evaluation --- Rural Development --- Rural roads --- Rural Roads & Transport --- Social cost-benefit analysis --- Transport --- Transport Economics Policy & Planning --- India

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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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This paper analyzes the effects of all-weather rural roads on households' net output prices, education and health in a poor, drought-prone region of India. Of 30 villages originally surveyed in 2001-02, when two had such roads, a further nine received them between January 2007 and December 2009 under the program Pradhan Mantri Gram Sadak Yojana. Cross-section comparisons involving all villages and 'before and after' comparisons in the nine yielded these findings: (i) net output prices were 5 per cent or more higher; (ii) substantially fewer days of schooling were lost due to bad weather, largely because teachers had fewer absences; (iii) the acutely sick received more timely treatment and were more likely to be treated in a hospital than in the nearest primary health clinic; and (iv) the respondents ranked the resulting benefits in the domains of health and education at least as highly as the 'commercial' ones.

Disease Control & Prevention --- Education --- Health --- Health Monitoring & Evaluation --- Housing & Human Habitats --- Rural Development --- Rural roads --- Social Accountability --- Transport --- Transport costs --- Transport Economics Policy & Planning --- India

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All-weather rural roads usually improve not only villagers' terms of trade, but also their educational attainments and health. Obtaining empirical estimates of the benefits generated by the first is straightforward, not so those generated by the others. The object of this paper is to estimate the relative sizes of their respective contributions to total benefits in connection with the all-India rural roads program Pradhan Mantri Gram Sadak Yojana, using an overlapping generations model featuring the production and consumption of goods and the formation of human capital in the presence of both morbidity and mortality. Based on survey evidence from upland Orissa in India and Bangladesh, as well as elements of more usual forms of calibration, the model yields a ratio of commercial to non-commercial benefits of about two-to-one in the first generation, falling to three-to-four in the second. This is broadly consistent with the valuations expressed by respondents in the Orissa survey, who ranked the latter benefits at least on a par with the former.

Adolescent Health --- Economic Theory & Research --- Education --- Environmental Economics & Policies --- Health --- Health Monitoring & Evaluation --- Rural Development --- Rural roads --- Transport --- Transport costs --- Transport Economics Policy & Planning --- India