GEP 19/04: Priority roads: The political economy of Africa's interior-to-coast roads

Summary

One striking feature about African roads is that, following up on a colonial pattern, they have evolved mostly in an interior-to-coast direction since decolonisation. This makes them potentially useful to export natural resources but relatively ill-suited to promote internal and regional connectivity. Although the shape of these roads has long been criticised by policy makers and development economists, a conclusive proof that they are indeed suboptimal has been hard to produce. This is because the complexity of the optimal network design problem together with limited data availability for this region make it hard to identify the optimal network that these networks should be compared with. Then, it is hard to rule out that they are not simply the optimal response to the geography or comparative advantage of the West African countries.

In this Nottingham School of Economics working paper Roberto Bonfatti and co-authors take an indirect approach and investigate the political circumstances under which these networks were built. They focus on Western Africa in the post-colonisation period (1965-2012). Controlling for country fixed effects and thus for geography, they document that the West African paved road networks expanded in a more interior-to-coast fashion in periods of autocracy, relative to periods of democracy. In particular, keeping fixed the number of kilometers paved, autocracies relative to democracies focused more on connecting metal and mineral deposits to ports, and less on connecting cities to cities (though the latter result is less strong). The largest cities tend to be on or near the coast, and metal and mineral deposits tend to be scattered and thus more likely to be located in a country's interior. Combined with the region's history of frequent autocratic rule, this empirical result goes towards explaining the observed interior-to-coast shape of the network. These findings are robust to controlling for factors that may drive changes in both political institutions and comparative advantage over time (such as time fixed effects, the world prices of the specific metals and minerals that each country exports, and civil conflict) and to instrumenting for democracy as suggested by the most recent literature on democracy and growth. These results suggests that Africa's interior-to-coast roads are at least in part the result of suboptimal political distortions.

GEP discussion paper 19/04: Priority roads: The political economy of Africa's interior-to-coast roads, by Roberto Bonfatti, Yuan Gu and Steven Poelhekke.

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Authors

Roberto Bonfatti, Yuan Gu and Steven Poelhekke

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