The Benefits of India's Rural Roads Program in the Spheres of Goods, Education and Health : Joint Estimation and Decomposition

Bell, Clive

World Bank, Washington, DC

关键词: ADULTHOOD;    AGE-GROUP;    AGED;    AGGREGATE SUPPLY;    ALGORITHM;   

DOI  :  10.1596/1813-9450-6169
RP-ID  :  WPS6169

学科分类：社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）

来源: World Bank Open Knowledge Repository

【 摘 要 】

All-weather rural roads usually improvenot only villagers' terms of trade, but also theireducational attainments and health. Obtaining empiricalestimates of the benefits generated by the first isstraightforward, not so those generated by the others. Theobject of this paper is to estimate the relative sizes oftheir respective contributions to total benefits inconnection with the all-India rural roads program PradhanMantri Gram Sadak Yojana, using an overlapping generationsmodel featuring the production and consumption of goods andthe formation of human capital in the presence of bothmorbidity and mortality. Based on survey evidence fromupland Orissa in India and Bangladesh, as well as elementsof more usual forms of calibration, the model yields a ratioof commercial to non-commercial benefits of about two-to-onein the first generation, falling to three-to-four in thesecond. This is broadly consistent with the valuationsexpressed by respondents in the Orissa survey, who rankedthe latter benefits at least on a par with the former.