Title
Roads and agriculture : Impacts of connectivity in Peru
Date Issued
01 December 2018
Access level
metadata only access
Resource Type
journal article
Author(s)
Publisher(s)
Fabrizio Serra Editore Srl
Abstract
Road infrastructure is extremely important in the rural areas of developing countries, where the main economic activity is agriculture. Using geo-referenced data on agricultural and transport sectors as well as instrumental variables specification based on the Kruskal algorithm we analyze the direct and indirect impact of road infrastructure on the agricultural sector in the Andes of Peru. The Andes mountains endow Peru with a very high topographical diversity. The high topographical diversity is related to longer travel time, higher road construction and maintenance costs, and lower density of the surface transportation network, which limits access to markets. We find that increasing road density in rural districts reduces the farmer's travel time by up to 2.9 hours as well the proportion of households that require less than 24 hours to travel from home to the district by up to 6 percent. Moreover, an additional unit of road density increases the participation in markets by 39 percent and reduces the proportion of output used for self-consumption and as own input by 49 and 5 percent respectively. Interestingly, the diversification of agricultural production follows an inverted U-shaped indicating that farmers reduce diversification as they experience the comparative advantage brought by the increased road connectivity. Our results are robust to the inclusion of year and region fixed-effects, and to controls for geography (i.e. gradient and altitude), population (i.e. education level), and mining activity.
Start page
605
End page
629
Volume
45
Issue
4
Language
English
OCDE Knowledge area
Planificación del transporte y aspectos sociales del transporte
Geografía económica y cultural
Subjects
Scopus EID
2-s2.0-85067187320
Source
International Journal of Transport Economics
ISSN of the container
03035247
Sponsor(s)
We thank Martín Rossi, Hugo Fano, Richard Webb, Carlos Amat y León, Rosario Gómez, Pablo Lavado, Héctor Maletta, and Iván Rivera for their useful comments and suggestions. This work was supported by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the Economic and Social Research Consortium (CIES), and the Peruvian Ministry of Agriculture and Water (MINAGRI) - Grant Number TCP/PER/3402. The opinions contained herein represent those of the author only.
Sources of information:
Directorio de Producción Científica
Scopus