The transport program in the country aims to improve access and mobility (rural and urban), enhance safety, and increase climate resilience while strengthening the capabilities of the sector institutions to deliver and manage transport infrastructure and services. The active portfolio amounts to $900 million and includes: Urban mobility and safety, supported by the Transport Sector Improvement Project (TRANSIP), rural access and regional connectivity, supported by the Road Sector Support Project (RSSP), and the Expressway Development Support Project (EDSP); policy dialogue and other institutional support in the areas of road safety, climate resilience, Public Private Partnerships (PPP), urban mobility, and railways reform. Operations have been predominantly in the road sector, which is the most dominant mode.
ethiopian transport policy pdf 21
This survey reviews the current state of the economic literature, assessing the impact of transport investments and policies on growth, inclusion, and sustainability in a developing country context. It also discusses the specific implementation challenges of transport interventions in developing countries.
Transport investments can be very large and transformative in their nature, leading or accompanying structural change (that is, the movement out of agriculture into industries and services). They may be needed to accompany the fast pace of urban growth currently occurring in Africa and Asia. While the provision of transport is potentially crucial for development, its impact depends on a variety of factors. Because these factors are not well understood, there is often a risk that transport investments are not cost-effective and do not produce the range of expected outcomes. Setting priorities in the strategic use of scarce resources should rely on a detailed understanding of how transport policies can produce growth-inducing effects and reduce social costs.
The objective of this paper is to review the broader direct and indirect benefits and costs of transport investments and policies in developing countries. We focus primarily on recent empirical literature, which, given advances in econometrics, has become increasingly robust. This literature covers a variety of issues, each study shedding light on a specific aspect. The largest share of papers looks at roads and, to a lesser extent, railways. Air and sea transport tends to be much less studied and this review reflects this bias. For evidence on industrialised countries, we refer the reader to recent literature surveys by Redding and Turner (2014) and Deng (2013). Straub (2011) and Trebilcock and Rosenstock (2015) review evidence from developing countries on infrastructure broadly defined, and Beuran, Gachassin, and Raballand (2015) focus specifically on roads in sub-Saharan Africa.
To account for the variety of mechanisms through which transport policies matter from a development perspective, we start in Section 2 by presenting a simple conceptual framework that details the links between the various interventions and impacts. Section 3 summarises the lessons from the literature, distinguishing effects on growth, inclusion and sustainability, and focusing mainly on papers published on developing countries. Finally, Section 4 concludes by discussing the implementation challenges faced by policy makers. The Online Appendix presents a general econometric framework for transport impact assessment and discusses, in light of this framework, how the recent literature addresses the main identification challenges.
There are three broad types of transport policies: infrastructure investments, price instruments, and regulations. Investments entail building new transport infrastructure (for example roads, railways, or airports), upgrading existing links and technology, or improving transport services. Price incentives include subsidies or taxes to influence mode choice and transport behaviour more generally (for example, student fare reductions, tolls, parking fares, fuel taxes, and clean transport subsidies). Regulations include rules to directly reduce emissions (such as fuel emission standards, or driving restrictions) or to organise the transport sector (for example, freight, taxis or buses) or the construction of infrastructure. Some policy interventions may affect supply, such as infrastructure investments, whereas others target demand, as do transport subsidies.
A useful categorisation of the broader objectives of policies can be (i) to stimulate growth (for example, through lower transport costs, which facilitates agglomeration effects, trade and structural change, and leads to higher productivity), (ii) to facilitate social inclusion (for instance, through better access to transport services, which can enhance economic opportunities for the poor), and (iii) to improve sustainability (for example, through reduced health and environmental externalities). The extent to which these broad objectives can be reached depends on the behavioural responses of firms and households to policy interventions in terms of trade, location and mode choices. This is represented in Figure 1 below.Transport Policies and DevelopmentAll authorsClaudia N. Berg, Uwe Deichmann, Yishen Liu & Harris Selod online:20 July 2016Figure 1. Impacts of transport policies: the mechanisms.
Outcome functions may represent any argument entering the utility function of individuals or the profit function of firms. For individuals, outcome functions would include all relevant variables affected by transport such as employment status and wage, access to amenities, prices of consumption goods, residential land rents, pollution externalities, health and education status, exposure to crime, and so forth.2 For firms, the outcome functions would include elements such as the effective size of demand (market access) or the Marshallian externalities of learning, sharing and matching (see Fujita & Thisse, 2002) facilitated by the transport system.
In line with our conceptual framework and reviewing mainly recent studies that apply a robust identification strategy, this section sequentially summarises the links between transport policies and growth, inclusion, and sustainability.
A reduction in transport costs may stimulate the volume of trade, open up new markets, induce new industries to form, and thereby influence the patterns of trade. Trade costs are very high in much of the developing world. In Ethiopia and Nigeria for instance, trade costs are four to five times larger than in the United States (Atkin & Donaldson, 2015). A significant portion of trade costs in developing countries, especially in African countries, is actually non-physical (Raballand, Macchi, & Petracco, 2010), reflecting costs and delays associated with border crossing, price mark-ups of non-competitive transport firms, and bribes. For Uganda, it has been estimated that the costs associated with infrastructure inefficiencies represent a greater tax on exporters than trade policy (Milner, Morrissey, & Rudaheranwa, 2000). In Africa generally, delays at borders and ports can last between 10 and 30 hours (Foster & Briceño-Garmendia, 2010).
Transport investments may have heterogeneous impacts across space with respect to trade and specialisation. In India, Donaldson (in press) finds that colonial railways built in the nineteenth century lowered interregional trade costs and price gaps, increased trade flows, and increased real income per unit of land area during the colonial period. In turn, this increased incomes within regions with railroads, but not always in areas without railroads. In China, Faber (2014) finds that reducing transport costs can lead to a reduction in industrial growth among connected peripheral regions relative to non-connected areas.
Increased trade and productivity result in greater production and higher incomes. In the context of China, it has been found that infrastructure (roads and highways) have a positive effect on per capita GDP at the county level (Banerjee, Duflo, & Qian, 2012) and that it increased real income (see the structural estimation of Roberts, Deichmann, Fingleton, & Shi, 2012, based on a New Economic Geography model). In the case of Nigeria, Ali et al. (2015a) find that reducing transport costs significantly increases local GDP but note that the full impact of transport costs on incomes may only emerge slowly over time. In Ghana and Kenya, railway access has had a positive impact on economic development both in the short and in the long run (Jedwab, Kerby, & Moradi, in press; Jedwab & Moradi, 2016). In sub-Saharan Africa, Storeygard (in press) estimates that cities close to a main port grow faster.
Improved transport networks may lead to structural transformation and the shift from subsistence to commercial agriculture. Lower transportation costs have been shown to cause an increase in the production of high-input crops at the expense of low-input crops (Ali et al., in press, on Nigeria). They also facilitate the adoption of modern farming techniques (see Ali et al., in press; on Nigeria, and Minten, Koru, & Stifel, 2013, on Ethiopia). Reduced transportation costs may also lead to a shift of production and labour away from the agricultural sector as evidenced by Gachassin, Najman, and Raballand (2015), who find that improved access to markets in Cameroon led to a diversification of the economic activities of households, especially among the most isolated households. For India also, it has been shown that new rural roads enabled workers to access external labour markets, leading them to shift away from agriculture (Asher & Novosad, 2016). Similarly, the construction of a new road in Vietnam was followed by the emergence of new non-farm activities (Mu & van de Walle, 2011). For Indonesia, Gertler, Gonzalez-Navarro, Gracner, and Rothenberg (2014) find that improved road quality increases job creation in the manufacturing sector and triggers an occupational shift from agriculture to manufacturing. In Nigeria, falling transportation costs both decrease the probability of agricultural employment by households, and increase the likelihood of full employment (Ali et al., 2015a). 2ff7e9595c
Commentaires