Rural Road Infrastructure Research Articles

English

The present study examined the effect of incentives in crop production and identified the determinants of incentives on farmers in Central Gujarat. The real domestic prices of the pearl millet, the major crop, moved in tandem with incentive component over time. But this incentive failed to provide push to the crop productivity of pearl millet during the period. The real domestic price of pearl millet declined during the period under study. The factors such as prevailing interest rate and rural road infrastructure significantly affected the total factor productivity in the crop. While easy loan facility by banks with accessibility to smallholder farmers could go a long way, access to local market could also be ensured with good connectivity of road particularly the smallholders farmers located closer to ravines.   Key words: Soil conservation, incentive, determinants.

Rural Roads and Intermediated Trade: Regression Discontinuity Evidence from Sierra Leone

Using a road-level regression discontinuity design in Sierra Leone, we study the impacts of improvements in rural road infrastructure on crop prices in rural markets. We show that the improved roads reduced market prices of local crops. These price effects are stronger in markets that are further from major urban centers and in less productive areas. In addition, these price effects are reversed in areas with better cell phone penetration. We show that our empirical findings are consistent with a search cost framework a la Mortensen, but inconsistent with other models, such as Bertrand competition, bilateral bargaining, Cournot oligopsony.

The Study of a Solution for the Rural Roads Infrastructure Data Examination

The infrastructure data plays a significant role in the construction and maintenance of the rural roads. It is highly necessary to better examine the rural roads infrastructure data, ensuring the authenticity, accuracy and validity of the data. This paper studies a method for the data examination, including the real time examination in the field procedure, and the indoor complete examination, examining the road line shape, mileage, important technical indices and the ancillary facilities’ positions and import technical indices. This paper designs a solution for the data examination and develops the Rural Road Infrastructure Data Examining System. According to the experiments, the efficiency of the solution is proved.

Application of Highway Development and Management Tool in Rural Road Asset Management

Road asset management is a systematic process of maintaining, upgrading, and operating road assets cost-effectively. Several thousand kilometers of rural roads have been constructed during the past few years in India. The performance of these newly constructed roads under actual traffic, climate, and environmental conditions will be monitored periodically; and a database with data on their performance will be created. The database can be used in planning and scheduling of maintenance activities to preserve the rural road infrastructure by use of sound engineering principles. This paper is an attempt to highlight the various issues that need special attention to preserve the rural road infrastructure assets that are created in the country. The paper presents the effect of timing of maintenance on the pavement condition during the design life and the increased agency cost due to the delay in maintenance intervention. The application of computer-based pavement management tools such as the Highway Development and Management Tool in planning and scheduling of appropriate maintenance strategies is highlighted.

Determinants of smallholder farmers' participation in banana markets in Central Africa: the role of transaction costs

AbstractA bivariate probit model was employed to jointly and separately estimate banana market participation decisions of buying and selling households in Rwanda and Burundi using household survey data. Selectivity bias was corrected for estimating the transacted volumes using Heckman's procedure. The results showed that transaction cost‐related factors such as geographical location of households, market information sources, and travel time to the nearest urban center influence market participation. Non‐price‐related factors such as security of land tenure, labor availability, off‐farm income, gender of the household head, and years of farming experience had a significant influence on the transacted volumes. Output prices had a significant correlation with sales volume, indicating price incentives increased supply by sellers. Generally, the findings suggest that policies aimed at investments in rural road infrastructure, market information systems, collective marketing, and value addition of banana products may provide a potential avenue for mitigating transaction costs and enhancing market participation and production of marketed surplus by rural households.

Income Risk and Crop Production Patterns of Small-Scale Farmers in Eastern Oromiya Region of Ethiopia

Income risk associated with crop production was analysed using the Quadratic Risk Programming Model for users and non-users of maize production technologies in Dadar district in Ethiopia. The E-V results revealed that both categories of farmers have the same degree of risk aversion as reflected by the degree of risk aversion coefficient (λ = 0.0008). In addition, the optimisation model results showed that improved maize production is associated with higher income risk as no more than the minimum subsistence constraint was chosen under higher degrees of risk aversion. While an increase in fertilizer prices reduced maize area cultivated for package users, the sensitivity analysis results for increases in maize prices showed a substantial rise in the area allocated to improved maize. However, for increased maize prices, area allocated to maize remained at subsistence level for non-users of the package. The development and promotion of new agricultural technologies need to take into account the yield and income risks associated with maize production in the area. In addition, expansion of rural road infrastructure, the promotion of post-harvest crop storage technologies and food processing industries should be given emphasis as strategies to stabilize prices and reduce income variability arising from crop production in the area.

Smallholder production structure and rural roads in Africa: the case of Nakuru District, Kenya

AbstractData from a 1998 survey of farming households in Kenya is used to estimate the effects of poor rural road infrastructure (and high market access costs) on the structure of smallholder farm production. Simultaneous estimation of cost and input share equations reveals rational responses by farmers to high access costs. In the expected continued absence of major investments in rural infrastructure in countries such as Kenya, the policy challenge is to identify and catalyse institutional innovations that reduce a range of transaction costs, increase financial liquidity, increase social capital, and reduce risk.

Smallholder production structure and rural roads in Africa: the case of Nakuru District, Kenya

Data from a 1998 survey of farming households in Kenya is used to estimate the effects of poor rural road infrastructure (and high market access costs) on the structure of smallholder farm production. Simultaneous estimation of cost and input share equations reveals rational responses by farmers to high access costs. In the expected continued absence of major investments in rural infrastructure in countries such as Kenya, the policy challenge is to identify and catalyse institutional innovations that reduce a range of transaction costs, increase financial liquidity, increase social capital, and reduce risk.

Sustainability of Rural Road Network Given Changing Demands of Rural Agriculture: Evidence from Texas

Over the past two decades, the changing transport demands of agriculture and rural industry and the strategic rail decisions that resulted in the abandonment of many rural rail links have had severe impacts on rural road infrastructure. As larger and heavier trucks haul products over longer distances on rural pavements, the financial ability of the state and local governments to maintain and improve the rural road network has been diminishing. Clearly there is a need to recognize the significance of the agriculture–transport relationship and to determine the impacts on rural roads associated with major agricultural traffic generators to ensure the sustainability of rural road networks. Evidence of the increased truck volumes associated with industrialized agriculture and strategic changes in the rail industry is provided through a case study of the grain industry, with specific emphasis on the production and consumption of corn in Texas. A methodology is suggested to quantify the impacts of increased truck volumes and axle loads on rural pavements that were not designed or built to accommodate more and heavier axle loads. It is believed that a simple methodology to quantify pavement damage can be invaluable to demonstrating rural maintenance needs and to informing rural transport investment decisions.

Design and Construction of Low-Cost, Low-Volume Roads in Australia

Inexpensive roads constructed by using local knowledge of material behavior have been shown to be capable of meeting rural traffic requirements without the need for importation of hard and expensive quarried crushed rock or gravel. In Australia, low-cost, low-volume roads are typically rural roads constructed in a broad range of operating environments, varying from arid to tropical. The areas that contain the longest length of rural roads, however, are arid or semiarid and are often subjected to periods with low levels of precipitation and high levels of evaporation, frequently followed by periods of intense rainfall. Locally available materials for road making may not meet the usual standard road authority requirements for high-quality aggregate and are thus termed “marginal,” “nonstandard,” or even “inferior.” Because these materials are a resource that cannot be ignored, locally derived specifications are formulated for specific materials to allow more efficient expansion and maintenance of road networks in remote rural areas. Many of the subgrades within arid and semiarid areas are sensitive to water ingress and are termed “cracking” or “expansive” clays. The combination of hostile environment, poor subgrade, and marginal construction aggregates means that the engineer must take an entrepreneurial approach when developing the rural road infrastructure. Some of the methods used to develop and maintain a highway infrastructure for remote rural areas in Australia are outlined, with the Western Queensland region used for illustrative purposes.

The Impact of Agricultural Extension on Farm Production in Resettlement Areas of Zimbabwe

In this paper, we revisit the contested issue of the impact of agricultural extension on farm production. We exploit two features of the data available to us: its longitudinal nature and explicit measures of farmer ability. We find that after controlling for innate productivity characteristics and farmer ability either using household fixed effects estimation, or by including a measure of farmer ability and village fixed effects, access to agricultural extension services, defined as receiving one or two visits per agricultural year, raises the value of crop production by about 15 per cent. This parameter estimate is statistically significant. However, we also find variability in these parameter estimates across individual crop years, with the impact being markedly different in drought and non-drought years. Collectively, these results suggest that although access to farm-level extension visits does increase productivity even after controlling for innate productivity characteristics and farmer ability, results from single-year cross-sectional studies should be treated with caution

Financing local rural road maintenance. Who should pay what share and why?

The benefits from minor rural road infrastructure can be very individual, when a road is important for reaching a (group of) farm(s), serving little or no inter-local traffic. Rural road maintenance therefore asks for a specific taxation model that distributes costs according to benefits involved for the individual taxpayer. The distribution of maintenance costs among taxpayers used by local governments is often poorly founded. A new model was developed for two local road maintaining governments in the Netherlands. In essence, the model emphasises that the basic facilities for reaching buildings and parcels along a road should be paid by the rural real estate owners. Extra facilities (like additional pavement width and plantings) enable inter-local traffic. Therefore, maintenance of these extra facilities should be paid by all inhabitants of the community. This article describes, in detail, the model used and the resulting cost distribution, among others in relation to the definition of `basic facility'. We compare these results with the cost distribution of comparable authorities and conclude that the model offers a logical and clear calculation of who pays what share and why. The model might also facilitate taxing the costs of road maintenance, in a broader sense, for a wide range of areas and governmental organisations.