The objective of this study was to examine the importance of managing and maintaining the quality of rural roads to support agricultural and rural development in the Kingdom of Swaziland, to facilitate the distribution of agricultural products and its accessibility to the population. A...

Based on extensive data collection in Uganda, this paper demonstrates that the rural access index, as defined today, should not be a government objective because the benefit of such investment is minimal, whereas achieving rural accessibility at less than 2 kilometers would require massive...

What are the main determinants of transport costs: network access or competition among transport providers? The focus in the transport sector has often been on improving the coverage of"hard"infrastructure, whereas in reality the cost of transporting goods is quite sensitive to the extent of...

Despite large amounts invested in rural roads in developing countries, little is known about their benefits. This paper derives an expression for the willingness-to-pay for a reduction in transport costs from the canonical agricultural household model and uses it to estimate the benefits of a...

While most economists assume that aid is fungible, most aid donors behave as if it is not. The authors study recipient government responses to development project aid in the context of a specific World Bank-financed project. They estimate the impact of a rural road rehabilitation project in...

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...

The importance of rural transport in addressing social exclusion has been acknowledged for some time. We report and comment on one particular case in North Yorkshire, a predominantly rural county in England, of how state, non-state and third/societal sectors worked together to market and improve...

The authors use a contingent valuation method to study the design of economic incentives to phase out polluting motorcycles in Bangkok. Like in many other cities, the government of Bangkok has been considering a series of control measures to discourage and eventually eliminate the use of heavily...