1. Rwanda Rural Feeder Roads Impact Evaluation: Creating a Data Ecosystem Maria Jones 18 July 2017

2. national scope = unique IE opportunity
Unique opportunity: usually road projects smaller in scope. GoR coordinating within financing from WB, USAID, EU and Netherlands. Policy objective: bring a motorable road within 2km of every farm in the country. Enhance market access and reduce transport costs for people as well as goods.

3. rehabilitation of rural feeder roads
Applies to 20% of national road network. Upgrading consists of: 1. Widening to the new 6 meter standard (2 lanes), 2. Adding a base layer and resurfacing with lateritic soil, 3. Constructing drainage structures

4. research questions
What is the impact of feeder road rehabilitation on …
… market prices of village imports and exports? (trade economics)
… HH adaptations to price changes in terms of goods produced and purchased? (consumer welfare functions)
… market valuation of improved road access as measured by aggregate land value changes? (asset pricing approach)
… Regional development as measured by total population? (welfare measure from urban economics)
improved roads
market efficiency
faster development

5. design Event study (at the segment level)
Exact timing of rehabilitation of any particular segment as good as random
idiosyncrasies of donor calendars, construction delays, permitting, and weather
Track exact start and end of construction for each segment
Key explanatory variable is road roughness before and after upgrading
Identification relies on high-frequency market information in catchment area of each road segment
sample restricted to segments located close to an existing market

6. Data

7. household sample Sample frame: all villages within 1km of road segment
2 sampled villages per segment
Class 1: close to a market (for identification)
Class 2: very remote, i.e. those whose transport costs are expected to change most with the road rehabilitation
15 HHs randomly selected in each village

8. HH surveys necessary but not sufficient
IE design
Event study design requires higher frequency data than practical through HH surveys
Scope of research questions
interest in precisely measuring market-wide price changes, which will be difficult for any one household to report
Sample size / budget practicalities
Difficult to know ex-ante which households will benefit most; catchment areas are large and little pre-existing data
impact for any one HH in segment catchment likely small

9. feeder roads: data ecosystem
Multi-module household surveys focused on income, consumption and production
Household Data
Market structure and composition (annual); availability and price of a basket of goods (monthly)
Market Data
Maps of all road segments, markets and villages
Geo data
Population census: sampling frame and migration
Population data
Land Administration Information System: all land transactions registered and geo-referenced
Land Data
International road roughness index; traffic counts; travel time
Road Data
Exact start and end date of construction
Project monitoring data

10. what makes this work?
Collaboration with project team started long before road construction (2012)
Coordinated monitoring data collection plan across donors so data can be easily merged
Rwandan government collects a lot of administrative data, relatively organized
Advantage of one national ID number, used for all government interactions

11. Early Results

12. market integration At baseline, market integration is poor
Most market vendors report being professional traders (not producers), but the majority sell at only one market
Product availability and price varies within small geographic areas

13. trader occupation

14. trader movement across markets

15. product availability This map shows a high availability good- tomatoes
Source: 2017 Price market survey

16. product price variance
This shows the variance in prices across the country. The markers are sized based on standard deviations away from the mean. The regression looks at the relationship between the price per kg of tomato and the distance to the national roads.
Source: 2017 Price market survey

17. preliminary HH impacts
First follow-up survey conducted one year after baseline
Few segments actually completed; analysis focuses on initial short-term impacts
Follow-up surveys to be conducted every 1-2 years over the project lifetime

18. preliminary results on HH income
Suggestive evidence that investing in feeder roads allows relatively remote HHs to catch up to relatively more connected HHs
Being located in a remote village decreases HH income by $73
Mean HH income is $316, so 23.1% decrease
But feeder road rehabilitation increases HH income by $74 (23.4% increase)
Results in a full catch-up to more connected villages
Effect driven by income from HH farm & related activities

19. Thank you!