Saturday, November 17, 2012

Ethiopia and Road Infrastructure

The International Growth Centre at the London School of Economics and Political Science published in September 2012 two papers on road infrastructure development in Ethiopia. The authors were Admasu Shiferaw, Mans Soderbom, Eyerusalem Siba and Getnet Alemu.

The first paper, titled "Road Infrastructure and Enterprise Development in Ethiopia," investigated whether the improvement in road infrastructure has affected the patterns of entry of new manufacturing firms and the size of new entrants. The authors found that better road access significantly increased a town's attractiveness for manufacturing firms and towns with a large number of firms continued to attract new firms. The authors concluded that improvements in the road infrastructure had a favorable impact on the size and structure of the manufacturing sector in Ethiopia.
Click here to read the report.

The second paper investigated how improvements in the road transport sector shaped the enterprise performance of the Ethiopian manufacturing sector using a firm level panel dataset and GIS based information on road networks. Click here to read the report.