Infrastructure and Development – The Political Economy of Road Placement in East Africa

Understanding the causes of African underdevelopment has become one of the most pressing policy questions of our time. African governments, it is often argued, are unrepresentative or unaccountable. Incumbent politicians may tend to favour individuals from the region from which they originate or who share their ethnicity. They are challenged by those who would like to appropriate resources for their own group. This intra-group conflict, it is argued, lies at the root of African underdevelopment (Mamdani, 1996; Easterly and Levine, 1997; Herbst, 2000). This project will provide some insights into this issue.

Using repeated maps which extend from pre-independence to the current period we will study the evolution of road networks (of different grades) across the districts of seven ex-British colonies. Sub-Saharan Africa remains a region with low infrastructure stock of all types - the poor quality of infrastructure is often viewed as a key reason why an increasing fraction of the world’s poor are located in Africa (World Bank, 1990, 1994). What is less well understood is what determines the distribution of infrastructure within countries. If politics exerts an influence then road networks in districts with limited representation at a given point in time may be neglected both in terms of new investment and in terms of funds for road maintenance. Over time this neglect may translate to higher poverty rates in these districts. If a political transition takes place where politicians from neglected districts gain power then trends may be reversed with infrastructure investment being withdrawn from previously favored districts.

To study the political economy of road placement in East Africa we will combine the map-based panel data set on roads for the 1960-1992 periods with a political data set on the birthplace and ethnicity of presidents and cabinet ministers. This will enable us to study whether, when independence occurred, the areas from which the new leaders hailed were favored. In this way the road network in the British period will act as a benchmark as it will arguably be less motivated by patronage considerations. Subsequent political transitions in the post-independence era can be studied in a similar way. By overlaying maps of the distribution of ethnic groups in a country we will be able to ascertain whether there were sharp changes in the placement of roads across ethnic boundaries when the ethnicity of the leadership changed. A panel data set of development outcomes will also be built up from censuses, household surveys and from and agricultural surveys to examine whether districts favored with greater investment in roads developed more quickly and experienced more rapid falls in poverty.