TY  - RPRT
        AU  - Bolivar, Osmar
AU  - Bacarreza, Gustavo J. Canavire
AU  - Balthrop, Andrew
        TI  - Hit the Road Juan: Welfare and Labor Market Effects of High-Quality Roads in Ecuador
        PY  - 2026/Mar/
        PB  - Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)
        CY  - Bonn
        T2  - IZA Discussion Paper
        IS  - 18451
        UR  - https://www.iza.org/index.php/publications/dp18451
        AB  - Road infrastructure boosts economic opportunities and thus contributes to poverty alleviation. This paper investigates the causal impact of paved primary roads on poverty and income mobility in Ecuador, with particular attention to the mechanisms through which these effects materialize.  exploiting variation in road expansion between 2012 and 2019, we track the construction of new major roads and link this information to socioeconomic outcomes reported in the national household survey. To achieve representativeness at a fine geographical scale, we employ the max-p region algorithm. Using staggered difference-in-differences estimators, we identify the causal effects of road infrastructure on poverty reduction and income dynamics. The findings indicate that access to paved major roads significantly reduces poverty rates overall. Middle-income households benefit from income growth following road access and these gains are attributable primarily to improvements
in employment quality rather than increases in employment rates, with the largest
effects concentrated in the primary sector.
        KW  - road infrastructure
KW  - poverty
KW  - middle class
KW  - Ecuador
        ER  -