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A new World Bank working paper by Paul Brenton and coauthors looks at what roads can do for development:

Market integration is key to ensuring sufficient and stable food supplies. This paper assesses the impediments to market integration in Central and Eastern Africa for three food staples: maize, rice, and sorghum. The paper uses a large database on monthly consumer prices for 150 towns in 13 African countries and detailed data on the length and quality of roads linking the towns. The analysis finds a substantial effect of distance and share of paved road on the level of market integration, as measured by relative prices. Furthermore, the paper evaluates the additional domestic and cross-border impediments to market integration in the region and represents them on a regional map. The analysis finds heterogeneous levels of domestic market integration across countries and significant “border effects” for the majority of contiguous countries in the sample, which reveal that markets are more integrated within than between countries. Countries that are members of the same regional trade agreement have substantially “thinner” borders with other members. Finally, the analysis shows that countries with less integrated domestic markets and “thicker” borders with their neighbors also have a higher prevalence of food insufficiency. These findings support policy efforts in tackling domestic and border impediments to transactions such as reforming customs, simplifying nontariff measures, addressing corruption, improving the quality of roads, and deepening regional trade agreements.

The emphasis is mine. None of these results are very surprising, but roads and infrastructure, even though they are about the least sexy investment an international development donor can make, are necessary for economic development.

Indeed, while they may not lend themselves to cool behavioral “nudges”or clever experimental designs, roads and infrastructure are what leads to the existence of markets, markets are what leads to more trade, and trade is what leads to large numbers of people attaining higher levels of welfare.

This is especially so when it comes to roads leading to lower food prices. Everyone needs food to live, and in developing countries, people often spend up to 80 percent of their income on food alone, which means that a significant reduction in food prices helps almost everyone. Just something to keep in mind the next time someone suggests handing out laptops to kids in developing countries…

In economics, a market failure is something that prevents a free market from attaining Pareto efficiency. A Pareto-efficient allocation is an allocation wherein it is not possible to make some people better off by redistributing resources without making at least someone worse off. Specific types of market failures are negative externalities (e.g., pollution, overfishing), public goods (e.g., education and vaccines), information asymmetries (e.g., adverse selection and moral hazard), fragmented or missing markets (e.g., the market for credit in developing countries), and so on.

What market failures are not is Stuff White People Dislike (SWPD). If you are not familiar with the satirical Stuff White People Like blog, it is well worth paying a visit; the site pokes fun at educated, liberal, upper middle-class people — the yuppies of yore, which the site refers to as “white people” for short — and among its many entries, one finds things like TED talks, the World Cup, being offended, graduate school, threatening to move to Canada, hybrid cars, Whole Foods and grocery co-ops, and so on.

A little over a year ago, I was fortunate to move to a department where my colleagues were all trained in the same discipline and methods I was trained in.

A department where, because I don’t have to spend the better part of my time justifying why my research is interesting, I can focus on doing more and better research, and where I can have a fulfilling career.

And last, but not least, a department where the atmosphere is also eminently collegial, relative to many other places.

If you are an environmental or natural resource economist and the foregoing sounds like a place where you can see yourself, we are hiring at the assistant professor level in that broad area. Here is our advertisement, from the latest round of Job Openings for Economists: