We examine the impact of rural road connectivity on economic and social outcomes in the context of India’s PMGSY, the world’s largest rural road program. Using a novel village-level survey explicitly designed around PMGSY’s rollout, we exploit quasi-random variation in road placement to...

Infrastructure improvement is one of the driving forces behind growth and structural changes in the village economy. This study aims to determine the impact of improvements in rural infrastructure, particularly connecting roads between villages, on the direction of changes in the main income...

This paper explores the effect of road rehabilitation on violent conflict using a novel, rich dataset of road rehabilitation projects in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The country received massive external investments in transport infrastructure rehabilitation under conditions of endemic...

Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) are essential to achieving the EU's vision of seamless transport for both passengers and freight. The availability of 'open' and high quality transport data will provide substantial improvements in performance of transport networks, operations and services,...

The Central Asia Regional Economic Cooperation (CAREC) region has historically been an important route for global trade - connecting Asia to Europe (and vice versa) and beyond through the ancient Silk Road before the evolution of maritime trade and commerce in the 1500s. The Asian Development...

Carter (2024) examines the historical conditions that shape protection versus assimilation for indigenous communities, arguing that state-led conscription programs are one such factor. In a natural experiment leveraging conscription for a 1920s Peruvian highway designed to replicate a...

The recent debates on infrastructure spending have led to renewed interest in the measurement of infrastructure and its effects on growth and well-being. This paper updates estimates of one important type of infrastructure capital—highways and streets. We compare BEA's capital measures with...

This paper builds on a previous paper by the authors (Kornfeld and Fraumeni, 2022) that primarily used U.S. Federal Highway Administration Highway Statistics data to disaggregate investment in highways and streets into more detailed types to produce updated estimates of net wealth stocks and...

This paper characterizes economically optimal investments into Africa's road network in partial and general equilibrium - based on a detailed topography of the network, road construction costs, frictions in cross-border trading, and economic geography. Drawing from data on 144 million...

This paper uses four decades of panel data on Brazilian municipalities to study the separate and joint impacts of highway and electricity infrastructure access on local economic outcomes. The identification strategy employs difference-in-difference estimators with staggered adoption design and...

Complexity of implementing construction projects has attracted various approaches in meeting project objectives. Among viable approaches, the purpose of this study considers mediating role of public procurement regulatory framework in successful construction project implementation. A dynamic...

The monograph pays attention to the problems and prospects of innovative development of the road and transport complex. In Ukraine, the road and transport complex is classified as a priority system. And taking into account its key role in the defense of the state, the need to carry out...

The structure employed is a small open economy, with one city and a rural hinterland, two traded goods, a transport sector, two specific factors, and mobile labour. A socially profitable programme will promote not only internal, but also external trade. Theory and numerical examples indicate...

This paper estimates the local welfare impacts of highway maintenance investments. We instrument road quality exploiting Indonesia’s two-step budgeting process for allocating funding to local road authorities. Using comprehensive data on road quality from 1990-2007, we find evidence that...

The development of toll roads provides a number of improved services to the road users, connectivity, and their existence can promote the equitable development of a region. The use of toll roads has a variety of impacts on economic issues. The quality of pavement gradually declines along with...

Forest roads can potentially cause environmental impacts, especially related to water dynamics and sediment production. To identify critical areas for forest road allocation, we considered landscape criteria such as slope, erodibility (K), distance to accumulated water flow, and aspect. The...

With the impacts of climate change intensifying, sea level is expected to rise 0.25–0.30 meters by 2050. With a one-degree Celsius rise in temperature, precipitation globally is expected to increase by 7%. An important service linked to these pressures are roads, which are known to flood and...

Do 'local' methods of evaluation, such as partial equilibrium analysis at market prices or estimation of shadow prices, provide reliable assessments of a large rural roads programme's social profitability? Consider a small open economy with one city and a rural hinterland, two traded goods, two...

We analyze the use of ℓ1-norm and Total Variation regularization within a model of road design to obtain sensible vertical alignments. With a dataset of twenty-three roads, we present a heuristic for choosing regularization parameters, and obtain cost bounds to establish a suitable choice for...

Penology in the Jim Crow South centered on the chain gang. Gangs ostensibly served three purposes: their severity served as a deterrent; their putting convicts to work on roads and other public improvements reduced the taxpayers’ costs of infrastructure; and their discriminatory implementation...

Complexity of implementing construction projects has attracted various approaches in meeting project objectives. Among viable approaches, the purpose of this study considers mediating role of public procurement regulatory framework in successful construction project implementation. A dynamic...

Increased consumption is a key driving factor for further economic development in China. This study examines the influence of road network density on consumption vitality, using big data and various empirical models. The results show that increasing the road density improves consumption...

This paper analyzes the existence of electoral cycles in infrastructure provision in the context of a large rural road building program in India. We use data covering 150,000 roads over a decade to demonstrate an increase in road building activity before state elections. These electoral cycles...

This article examines the impact of transport policies on road accessibility in Ghana. To measure accessibility gains, the article applies a model that compares the area and population that can be reached in under four hours by road from any city in 2010 and 2019. By quantifying travel times...