Person:
Iimi, Atsushi
Author Name Variants
Fields of Specialization
Industrial organization,
Development economics
Degrees
External Links
Departments
Transport Global Practice
Externally Hosted Work
Contact Information
Last updated
August 2, 2023
Biography
Atsushi Iimi is a Senior Economist in the Transport Global Practice of the World Bank where he specializes in development economics related to the Bank’s transport operations in Africa. He joined the World Bank in 2006 after earning a Ph.D. in economics from Brown University. Before joining the Bank, he also worked at IMF and JICA/OEFC, Japan. His research interests include spatial analysis, rural accessibility, evaluation of transport and energy projects, growth and public expenditure. His research on these topics has been published in scholarly journals, such as the Review of Industrial Economics, Journal of Urban Economics, Journal of Applied Economics, the Development Economies, and IMF Staff Papers.
Publication Search Results
1 - 4 of 4
-
Publication
Firm Productivity and Locational Choice: Evidence from Mozambique
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-07)Transport infrastructure is an important driving force for economic growth. Africa has been lagging behind in the global manufacturing market. Among others, infrastructure is often an important constraint. The paper reexamines the impacts of transport infrastructure on firm productivity in Mozambique. A conventional cost function is estimated with two rounds of firm data collected in 2007 and 2018. It is found that improved transport connectivity, particularly access to a port, has a positive impact on firm production. Firm inventory is also an important determinant of firm productivity. Over the long term, agglomeration economies are also found to be significant and associated with port accessibility. These findings are consistent with the fact that the Government of Mozambique heavily invested in the primary road network during the first half of the 2010s. The improved transport network is considered to have contributed to the country’s robust economic growth in the industrial and service sectors until the mid-2010s. -
Publication
Estimating the Impact of Improved Roads on Access to Health Care: Evidence from Mozambique
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-07)The paper recasts light on the linkage between transport infrastructure and human capital development. Health care access is an important challenge in many developing countries. In particular in remote rural areas, it is not easy to access good quality health care services. Among others, transport connectivity is often an important constraint. The paper estimates the impact of transport connectivity on access to health care services in Mozambique, especially focused on people’s decision about whether they visit and ask for advice at a health facility if they have a fever. This is a critical question in Mozambique where malaria is still a life-threatening disease. About three-quarters of the total population does not have access to health facilities by walking. The paper shows that transport connectivity to health facilities is a significant determinant of people’s health care access. Owning transport means, such as a bike or a motorcycle, is also instrumental to promoting people’s access to health care. The rich are more likely to benefit from health care services, suggesting a need for other complementary policies, such as a health care subsidy and insurance, to improve health care accessibility. -
Publication
Agricultural Production and Transport Connectivity: Evidence from Mozambique
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-07-02)Despite the richness of the existing literature, it remains a challenge to find rigorous evidence of the impacts of transport connectivity on agricultural production. The paper aims at contributing to the prolonged debate on the transport-agriculture nexus in Africa, by taking advantage of the unique circumstances in Mozambique where the government intensively invested in road infrastructure during a relatively short period of time in the 2010s. With the highly disaggregated location-specific fixed-effects and instrumental variable technique used to control for the endogeneity issue, the paper shows that the improved road connectivity increased agricultural production significantly. In particular, access to domestic markets is found to be important. It is also found that agricultural production exhibits decreasing returns to scale, heavily depending on land input. -
Publication
New Rural Access Index: Main Determinants and Correlation to Poverty
( 2016-11)Transport connectivity is essential to sustain inclusive growth in developing countries, where many rural populations and businesses are still considered to be unconnected to the domestic, regional, or global market. The Rural Access Index is among the most important global indicators for measuring people’s transport accessibility in rural areas where the majority of the poor live. A new method to calculate the Rural Access Index was recently developed using spatial data and techniques. The characteristics of subnational Rural Access Index estimates were investigated in eight countries: Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Kenya, Mozambique, Nepal, Tanzania, Uganda, and Zambia. It was found that for the countries in Africa, road density and road condition are important determinants of the Rural Access Index. For the South Asian countries, improvement of road condition is particularly relevant. The evidence suggests that significant resources are likely to be required to achieve universal access through rehabilitating the existing road network and expanding the road network.