Abstract

Agriculture remains an important economic sector in Africa, employing a large share of the labor force and earning foreign exchange. Among others, transport connectivity has long been a crucial constraint in Africa. In theory, railways have a particularly important role to play in shipping freight and passengers at low cost. However, most African railways were in virtual bankruptcy by the 1990s. Using a large sample of data comprised of more than 190,000 households over eight years in Ethiopia, the paper estimates the impacts of rail transport on agricultural production. Methodologically, the paper takes advantage of the historical event that a major rail line connecting the country to the regional hub, the Port of Djibouti, was abandoned in the 2000s. With spatially highly disaggregated fixed effects and instrumental variables incorporated, an agricultural production function is estimated. The elasticity with respect to port connectivity is estimated at 0.276. The use of fertilizer is also found to increase with transport cost reduction, supporting the fact that a large amount of fertilizer is imported to Ethiopia. Document type: Book

Abstract

This paper examines the association between the intensity, timing, and persistence of personal history of mobility on individual support for redistribution. Using both rounds of the Life in Transition Survey, the paper builds measures of downward mobility for about 57,000 individuals from 27 countries in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. The analysis finds that more intensive, recent, and persistent downward mobility increases support for redistribution more. A number of extensions and checks are done by, among others, taking into account systematic bias in perceived mobility experience, considering an alternative definition of redistributive preferences, and exploring the severity of omitted variable bias problems. Overall, the results are robust. Document type: Book