Adam Storeygard, from Brown, is on the job market, and he says yes.
Focusing on countries whose largest, or primate, city is also a port, I find that as the price of oil increases from $25 to $97 (as it did between 2002 and 2008), if city A is 465 kilometers (1 standard deviation) farther away from the primate than initially identical city B, its economy is roughly 6 percent smaller than city B’s at the end of the period. At a differential of 2360 kilometers, the largest in the data, this rises to 32 percent. I then determine that this effect falls disproportionately on cities that are connected to the primate by paved roads, most likely because they are initially more engaged in trade. Cities connected to the primate by unpaved roads appear to be more affected by transport costs to secondary cities.
An argument for more roads for Africa?
2 Responses
I very much agree with this. I was recently in Liberia for a couple of months and was amazed by the scarcity of good in many markets. Eventually I figured out that this was to a large degree related to the lack of good roads, many things woud simply not survive the trip to the market. I wrote a short blog post about this here: http://sm4good.com/2011/06/28/liberia-importance-roads/
Anyone else get the image of a huge ape in long chains after reading this?