Revising The Roads Investment Strategy In Rural Areas: An Application For Uganda

Abstract

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 investments that are not sustainable. Taking into account the fact that plot size is limited on average to less than 1 hectare, a farmer's transport requirement is usually minimal and does not necessarily involve massive investments in infrastructure. This is because most farmers cannot fully load a truck or pay for this service This paper-a product of the Transport Unit, Africa Region-is part of a larger effort in the unit to evaluate impact of rural roads on economic development. Policy Research Working Papers are also posted on the Web at http://econ.worldbank. org. The author may be contacted at graballand@worldbank.org. and, even if productivity were to increase significantly, the production threshold would not be reached by most individual farmers. Therefore, in terms of public policy, maintenance of the existing rural roads rather than opening new roads should be given priority; the district feeder road allocation maintenance formula should be revised to take into account economic potential and, finally, policy makers should devote their attention to innovative marketing models from other countries where smallholder loads are consolidated through private-based consolidators.

Targeting Maps: An Asset-Based Approach to Geographic Targeting

“…Our results identify promising areas to target as well as indicate key assets to use in a geographic targeting scheme. Further, our results are consistent with recent Uganda-specific research regarding transportation infrastructure (Lall et al 2009, Raballand et al 2009). Our findings reinforce the value of geographic targeting and the importance of spatial analysis.…”

“…Figures 1 and 2 and the correlations in Table 4 indicate that the benefits to additional road investments are largest primarily surrounding urban areas. 21 Given the differences in methods and data between our work and that of Raballand et al (2009) andLall et al (2009), the consistency in results suggests that our method generates sensible results. We found no other comparable empirical studies of spatial distribution of returns in Uganda against which we could compare our results.…”

“…Raballand et al (2009) examine the roads investment strategy and find that the goal of extending road access to within 2 km of every household is misguided and that larger gains exist in improving and maintaining existing roads. Lall et al…”

Prioritizing Rural Investments in Africa: A Hybrid Evaluation Approach Applied to Uganda

“…They find that reducing households' average distance to the nearest feeder road by 1 percent causes agricultural incomes to increase by 0.139 percent. Raballand et al (2009) also find a significant and positive relationship between agricultural incomes and rural road density in Uganda. We therefore adopt a road elasticity of 0.139, thus assuming a strong relationship between road density and households' access to roads.…”

Agriculture, Roads, and Economic Development in Uganda

“…Our chapter relates to an issue raised by Raballand et al (2009), who have argued that improvements in rural roads in Uganda would have little impact because productivity levels are too low to justify more frequent or heavier traffic. Their paper takes productivity levels as fixed; ours considers the connections between improvements in transportation, changes in input and output prices, and the resulting changes in yield and production.…”