![Sample our Humanities journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5939/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Humanities.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
Transport investment has played an important role in the economic development of many countries. Starting from a low base, African countries have recently initiated several massive transportation infrastructure projects. However, surprisingly little is known about the current levels, past evolution, and correlates of transportation infrastructure in Africa. In this paper, we introduce a new data set on the evolution of the stocks of railroads (1862–2015) and multiple types of roads (1960–2015) for 43 sub-Saharan African countries. First, we compare our estimates with those from other available data sets, such as the World Development Indicators of the World Bank. Second, we document the aggregate evolution of transportation investments over the past century in Africa. We confirm that railroads were a ‘colonial’ transportation technology, whereas paved roads were a ‘post-colonial’ technology. We also highlight how investment patterns have followed economic patterns. Third, we report conditional correlations between five-year infrastructure growth and several geographic, economic and political factors during the period 1960–2015. We find strong correlations between transportation investments and economic development as well as more political factors including pre-colonial centralization, ethnic fractionalization, European settlement, natural resource dependence, and democracy.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
We thank Harris Selod and seminar audiences at the African School of Economics and the World Bank for helpful comments, and Yasmin Abisourour, Karen Chen, Rose Choi, Taher Elsheikh, Yury Higuchi, Erin McDevitt, and Emily Ryon for research assistance. We are grateful to Uwe Deichmann and Siobhan Murray for sharing their roads data.
Notes
2 Since 2000 annual per capita GDP growth has averaged over 2%, following 25 years with an average near –1%. Debt service as a fraction of GNI, over 4% in the 1990s, is now below 2% (World Bank Citation2016b).
3 Several countries have initiated various widely reported giant transportation projects such as the Abidjan–Lagos motorway ($8 billion), the Mombasa–Kampala–Kigali railway ($14 billion), the Tanzania–Gabon railway ($33 billion) and the Trans-Kalahari railway ($9 billion).
4 For example, as of June 12, 2017, the African Development Bank explained on its website that the new Dakar-Diamniadio highway in Senegal is a ‘gateway to a new economic development pole […] it is expected to improve the living environment of people living in the vicinity of the road as well as enhance the overall operation of the transportation system, accelerate growth and promote regional integration […] its impact goes beyond Senegal.’
5 On a micro scale, Collier et al. Citation2015 consider the determinants of the unit cost of road construction, using a sample of 3,322 projects in 1984–2008 in 99 low and middle-income countries. They find that construction costs are higher in conflict countries and countries with higher levels of corruption. Our work complements theirs by focusing on built quantities rather than building costs.
6 This excludes North Africa, and the five following small island African nations: Cape Verde, Comoros, Mauritius, Saõ Tomé and Seychelles. We do not separate Sudan and South Sudan.
7 Michelin draws its information from four sources: (i) the previous Michelin map, (ii) government road maps, (iii) direct information from its tire distributors across Africa, and (iv) correspondence from road users including truckers. As Michelin has been one of the largest tire companies in the world for many years, its network of distributors and customers is large, and their information represents a potentially large improvement to government maps, which are not regularly updated. Still, these data are unlikely to report all improvements immediately, and they are perhaps less likely to report substantial degradation in surface quality than substantial improvements. Finally, this data capture the quality of roads within a surface class, so when a severely potholed paved road is resurfaced, our data do not reflect this.
8 We also replace zeros with the lowest sample value before logging.
9 For the years 1935 and 1950, the road density of Burundi and Rwanda was proxied by the road density of ‘Ruanda-Urundi’, and the road density of 14 former French colonies was proxied by the road densities of ‘French Equatorial Africa’ and ‘French West Africa’.
10 The 1990 International Geary-Khamis $ is a hypothetical unit of currency that has the same purchasing power parity that the US dollar had in the United States in 1990. Using 1990 as a benchmark year is standard among economic historians using historical data on per capita GDP.
11 The main sources are Communauté Économique Européenne Citation1966, O’Connor Citation1971, Citation1978, Ekundare Citation1973, Mlambo Citation1994, Harrison Citation1995, Dierks Citation2001, Perkins Citation2003, Perkins et al. Citation2005, Gewald et al. Citation2009, Jedwab Citation2013, Burgess et al. Citation2015; Jedwab and Moradi Citation2016.
12 We are grateful to an anonymous referee for this point.
13 One could have thought the export of mineral resources would have required more roads, but it is not necessarily the case ceteris paribus. Most oil in Africa is produced very near the coast or offshore. Some mineral resources are light (e.g., diamonds and gold). And heavier mineral resources such as bauxite and iron ore often rely on colonial or early post-independence railroad networks. Finally, mineral resources are typically more spatially concentrated than agricultural resources, and therefore may be well-served by a smaller number of roads. We thank an anonymous referee for this last point.
14 Madagascar was not included in the analysis of Jedwab and Storeygard Citation2017.