Priority Roads: The Political Economy of Africa's Interior-to-Coast Roads

Arbeitspapier

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 geography 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.

Object Details

• Language: Englisch

References and Relationships

• Bibliographic citation: Series: CESifo Working Paper ; No. 7478

Classification and Topics

• Classification: Wirtschaft ; Capitalist Systems: Political Economy ; Socialist Systems and Transitional Economies: Political Economy; Property Rights ; Political Processes: Rent-seeking, Lobbying, Elections, Legislatures, and Voting Behavior ; National Government Expenditures and Related Policies: Infrastructures; Other Public Investment and Capital Stock ; Economic Development: Urban, Rural, Regional, and Transportation Analysis; Housing; Infrastructure ; Exhaustible Resources and Economic Development
• Subject: political economy ; democracy ; infrastructure ; natural resources ; development

Contributors, Places and Time

• Event: Geistige Schöpfung
• (who): Bonfatti, Roberto ; Gu, Yuan ; Poelhekke, Steven
• Event: Veröffentlichung
• (who): Center for Economic Studies and ifo Institute (CESifo)
• (where): Munich
• (when): 2019

Further information

• Handle: http://hdl.handle.net/10419/198838
• Last update: 10.03.2025, 11:45 AM CET