A Better Pathway to Export: How the Quality of Road Infrastructure Affects Export Performance

Assessing the trade impact of road quality improvements is data demanding. In this article, we overcome this limitation by combining highly disaggregated records of export flows with detailed geo-referenced information of the Chilean transport network, including its road quality, as well as real measures of transport costs of shipping goods within the country to measure the trade impact of improving road quality. We find that an improvement in road quality that generates an average reduction in transport costs of 16% increases average exports by around 2%, but we find considerable dispersion in these gains.