IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/oxf/oxcrwp/215.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Priority Roads: the Political Economy of Africa’s Interior-to-Coast Roads

Author

Listed:
  • Roberto Bonfatti
  • Yuan Gu
  • Steven Poelhekke

Abstract

Africa’s interior-to-coast roads are well suited to export natural resources, but not to support regional trade. Are they the optimal response to geography and comparative advantage, or the result of suboptimal political distortions? We investigate the political determinants of road paving in West Africa across the 1965-2012 period. Controlling for ge¬ography and the endogeneity of democratization, we show that autocracies tend to connect natural resource deposits to ports, while the networks expanded in a less interior-to-coast way in periods of democracy. This result suggests that Africa’s interior-to-coast roads are at least in part the result of suboptimal political distortions.

Suggested Citation

  • Roberto Bonfatti & Yuan Gu & Steven Poelhekke, 2019. "Priority Roads: the Political Economy of Africa’s Interior-to-Coast Roads," OxCarre Working Papers 215, Oxford Centre for the Analysis of Resource Rich Economies, University of Oxford.
    • Handle: RePEc:oxf:oxcrwp:215
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:38dc1869-c2d5-405b-8679-d620a57635d4
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Krantz, Sebastian, 2024. "Optimal investments in Africa's road network," Kiel Working Papers 2272, Kiel Institute for the World Economy (IfW Kiel), revised 2024.
    2. Lorz, Oliver, 2020. "Investment in trade facilitating infrastructure: A political-economy analysis," European Journal of Political Economy, Elsevier, vol. 65(C).
    3. Lebrand,Mathilde Sylvie Maria, 2021. "Corridors without Borders in West Africa," Policy Research Working Paper Series 9855, The World Bank.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    political economy; democracy; infrastructure; natural resources; development;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • P16 - Political Economy and Comparative Economic Systems - - Capitalist Economies - - - Capitalist Institutions; Welfare State
    • P26 - Political Economy and Comparative Economic Systems - - Socialist and Transition Economies - - - Property Rights
    • D72 - Microeconomics - - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making - - - Political Processes: Rent-seeking, Lobbying, Elections, Legislatures, and Voting Behavior
    • H54 - Public Economics - - National Government Expenditures and Related Policies - - - Infrastructures
    • O18 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economic Development - - - Urban, Rural, Regional, and Transportation Analysis; Housing; Infrastructure
    • Q32 - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics - - Nonrenewable Resources and Conservation - - - Exhaustible Resources and Economic Development

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:oxf:oxcrwp:215. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Melis Boya (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/oxcaruk.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.