Abstract
This brief summarizes the results of a gender impact evaluation study, entitled The poverty impact of rural roads : evidence from Bangladesh, conducted during the time period 1995 to 1996 in Bangladesh. The study observed that a rationale for public investment in rural roads is that households can better exploit agricultural and nonagricultural opportunities to employ labor and capital more efficiently. Significant knowledge gaps persist, however, as to how opportunities provided by roads actually filter back into household outcomes as well as distributional consequences. Rural road investments are found to reduce poverty significantly through higher agricultural production, higher wages, lower input and transportation costs, and higher output prices. Road investments are pro-poor, meaning the gains are proportionately higher for the poor than for the non-poor.
Highlights
Improved roads and infrastructure can create opportunities for economic growth and poverty reduction through a range of mechanisms
Road development contributes to higher productivity and demand for labor (Leinbach 1983; World Bank 2000), and improved education and health, including for women and girls (Bryceson and Howe 1993; Levy 1996)
The results show that the returns to road investment for household per capita expenditure are about 11 percent in the Rural Development Project (RDP) and RRMIMP villages, a substantial gain in terms of higher consumption and income for rural households
Summary
Improved roads and infrastructure can create opportunities for economic growth and poverty reduction through a range of mechanisms. Examining the distributional consequences of road development across different income levels has been an additional challenge, on top of the need for a methodology that estimates effects over time and is able to control for unobserved heterogeneity. Aside from Lokshin and Yemtsov (2005), who conduct their analysis on “poor” and “non-poor” samples to find that each group benefits differently from road development, distributional effects of rural road investments have not been addressed extensively in the rural road literature, hampering assessments of the true breakdown of poverty reduction from infrastructural improvements. Our paper, using the BIDS panel data, estimates the income-consumption benefits of road investment by controlling for both household- and community-level heterogeneity. Development on consumption can be translated into poverty impacts, and presents the poverty effects of road investment across different types of households.
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
