{"id":11238,"date":"2015-08-05T05:00:34","date_gmt":"2015-08-05T09:00:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/?p=11238"},"modified":"2015-08-05T06:24:10","modified_gmt":"2015-08-05T10:24:10","slug":"myths-on-roads-in-africa","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/11238","title":{"rendered":"Myths about Roads and Transportation in Africa"},"content":{"rendered":"

Large investments in road infrastructure continue to be high on the agenda\u00a0of many African countries, only a few of which have actually amended their\u00a0investment strategy. In many cases, there seems to be a preference for a\u00a0status quo that can easily be explained by political-economy factors driving\u00a0policies in the sector. After presenting data on the state of roads in sub-Saharan Africa (length, density, condition), this article demonstrates how\u00a0most countries\u2019 transport strategies are based on certain misperceptions and\u00a0recommends better prioritization of investments, better procurement and\u00a0contract management, better projects implementation and better monitoring\u00a0to improve the developmental impact of recent road investments.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That’s the abstract of a new article<\/a> by Beuran et al. in the Development Policy Review<\/em>. Given that I have done a bit of work on market participation and market access, I think roads are probably one of the most important investments the public sector can undertake in sub-Saharan Africa.<\/p>\n

Also, that\u00a0bit about political economy considerations hit close to home. Roads are not sprinkled\u00a0randomly across the landscape (ask anyone who’s ever had to deal with them as a regressor just how endogenous roads are), and as with every other public good, roads are often built\u00a0to reward those communities who support the regime, and they are often not built to punish those communities who oppose the regime.<\/p>\n

When I was doing fieldwork in Madagascar–a country where most people eat rice three times a day if they can help it–in 2004, I was struck by how difficult it was to access Lac Alaotra–my field site, and the country’s biggest rice-producing region–from the capital: Much of the road between Antananarivo and Ambatondrazaka, the capital of Lac Alaotra, was unpaved, which made it\u00a0at worst impracticable and at best a road on which you could hope to drive at a speed of about 15 kilometers per hour. This was bad news for food security, because\u00a0it simultaneously made it very difficult to move rice from Lac Alaotra to the capital and depressed the Lac Alaotra rice producers’ incentives to become more productive by reducing their market access. That sad state of affairs\u00a0all started making sense when I was told how the people of Lac\u00a0Alaotra region never had really supported the socialist regime of Didier Ratsiraka, who ruled the country until 2002. More than ten years later, it looks like the road leading to Ambatondrazaka is only partly paved, and things are only getting worse with every rainy season<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Similarly, my dad once told me about a story about an uncle of his who had served as a member of the legislative assembly. One day, probably sometime in the late 1950s, my dad’s uncle took my dad for a drive around his district. Coming to the end of a paved road, my dad’s uncle turned to my dad, and he said: “You see where this road ends? The people who live over there never voted for me…”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Large investments in road infrastructure continue to be high on the agenda\u00a0of many African countries, only a few of which have actually amended their\u00a0investment strategy.<\/p>\n

Continue readingMyths about Roads and Transportation in Africa<\/span><\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11238","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","entry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1gPg8-2Vg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11238","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11238"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11238\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11253,"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11238\/revisions\/11253"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11238"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11238"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11238"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}