Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/115443 
Authors: 
Year of Publication: 
2012
Series/Report no.: 
IDB Working Paper Series No. IDB-WP-465
Publisher: 
Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), Washington, DC
Abstract: 
Assessing the trade impacts of domestic transport costs is data demanding and analyses that examine the effects of road quality, a critical aspect in regional and public policy, practically do not exist in the international trade literature. The few studies available rely mostly on distancebased measures as proxies of transport costs which impede analyzing the trade effects of transport-infrastructure improvements. In this paper, we combine highly disaggregated records of export flows with detailed geo-referenced information of the Colombian transport network, including its road quality, as well as real measures of transport costs of shipping goods within the country to measure the trade impacts of improving road quality. We find that the trade effects of improvements in road quality are relatively small on average; however, there is considerable heterogeneity in the magnitude of the effects. We show that longer routes have larger shares of their roads in poor conditions; accordingly, the trade impacts of shipments originated in remote regions are found to be quite substantial.
Subjects: 
Transport costs
road quality
regional exports
JEL: 
F10
R10
O2
Persistent Identifier of the first edition: 
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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