This study evaluates the impact of investment in rural roads on household welfare in Albania. Using a difference-in-differences method, we find that treated households experienced a 35-percentage point increase in the quality of roads relative to control households and reduced travel times to the nearest motorable roads. The study also demonstrates that the price and value of residential and farmland increased in the treated communities. Household heads in treated communities were less likely to be unemployed, and there was a higher incidence of self-employment in treated households, which seems to suggest a pattern of households shifting away from paid employment to self-employment in response to improved economic opportunities due to improved connectivity. The study does not find a significant effect on household income, but finds an increase in consumption expenditure. In general, these findings indicate that investments in rural roads have had positive impacts on the welfare of the family in Albania.
We use cookies to provide you with an optimal website experience. This includes cookies that are necessary for the operation of the site as well as cookies that are only used for anonymous statistical purposes, for comfort settings or to display personalized content. You can decide for yourself which categories you want to allow. Please note that based on your settings, you may not be able to use all of the site's functions.
Cookie settings
These necessary cookies are required to activate the core functionality of the website. An opt-out from these technologies is not available.
In order to further improve our offer and our website, we collect anonymous data for statistics and analyses. With the help of these cookies we can, for example, determine the number of visitors and the effect of certain pages on our website and optimize our content.