Publication: The Benefits of India's Rural Roads Program in the Spheres of Goods, Education and Health : Joint Estimation and Decomposition
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Date
2012-08
ISSN
Published
2012-08
Author(s)
Abstract
All-weather rural roads usually improve
not only villagers' terms of trade, but also their
educational attainments and health. Obtaining empirical
estimates of the benefits generated by the first is
straightforward, not so those generated by the others. The
object of this paper is to estimate the relative sizes of
their respective contributions to total benefits in
connection with the all-India rural roads program Pradhan
Mantri Gram Sadak Yojana, using an overlapping generations
model featuring the production and consumption of goods and
the formation of human capital in the presence of both
morbidity and mortality. Based on survey evidence from
upland Orissa in India and Bangladesh, as well as elements
of more usual forms of calibration, the model yields a ratio
of commercial to non-commercial benefits of about two-to-one
in the first generation, falling to three-to-four in the
second. This is broadly consistent with the valuations
expressed by respondents in the Orissa survey, who ranked
the latter benefits at least on a par with the former.
Link to Data Set
Citation
“Bell, Clive. 2012. The Benefits of India's Rural Roads Program in the Spheres of Goods, Education and Health : Joint Estimation and Decomposition. Policy Research working paper;no. 6169. © World Bank, Washington, DC. http://hdl.handle.net/10986/12007 License: CC BY 3.0 IGO.”
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