Impacts of Road Access on Subjective Well‐being in Timor‐Leste

• Author: Rommel Rabanal,Aekapol Chongvilaivan,Kiyoshi Taniguchi
• Date: 01 March 2016
• Published date: 01 March 2016
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/asej.12086

Impacts of Road Access on Subjective Well-being

in Timor-Leste

Aekapol Chongvilaivan, Kiyoshi Taniguchi and Rommel Rabanal

Received 6 January 2015; accepted 26 November 2015

The impacts of access to roads on subjective well-being at the household level are

empirically examined using Timor-Leste’s nationally representative surveys. This

paper examines not only the quantity, but also the quality of road infrastructure

and, thus, extends existing studies that only consider the benef‌its of road accessibil-

ity. It is found that proximity to main roads may not necessarily result in improved

welfare. Instead, ensuring all-weather access to roads appears to be a more signif‌i-

cant factor in raising household well-being. Specif‌ically, road accessibility during

the rainy season reduces the probability of households reporting a ‘less than ade-

quate’(low satisfaction) response by 13–25 percent. This suggests that in Timor-

Leste, and likely in other developing economies under similar conditions, mainte-

nance of existing roads is more essential to well-being than building more roads.

Keywords: economic development, road access, subjective well-being.

JEL classif‌ication codes: I30, O18, R40.

doi: 10.1111/asej.12086

I. Introduction

An eff‌icient and reliable road network that effectively links people, opportunities

and markets can place an economy in the fast lane on the road toward develop-

ment. The ultimate goal of development is to raise the well-being of a society

through improvements in social, political and economic conditions. To realize this

goal, transport infrastructure investment is among the main government interven-

tions used to underpin a push toward development. The argument rests with a

straightforward logic that transportation infrastructure (e.g. roads, railways, sea-

ports and airports) broadens economic opportunities by creating markets, linking

factors of production and connecting value chains. Transport infrastructure is also

used intensively by all economic groups, resulting in more inclusive economic

* Chongvilaivan (corresponding author): Southeast Asia Department, Asian Development Bank, 6

ADB Avenue, Mandaluyong City, 1550 Metro Manila, the Philippines. Email: achongvilaivan@adb.

org. Taniguchi:Private Sector Operations Department, Asian Development Bank. Rabanal: Pacif‌ic De-

partment, Asian Development Bank. This paper benef‌ited from constructive comments from the Edi-

tors, anonymous referees, and participants at the 14th East Asian Economic Association Meeting in

Bangkok. The views expressed in this paper are those of the authors and do not necessarily ref‌lect

the views and policies of the Asian Development Bank or its Board of Governors or the governments

they represent.

© 2016 East Asian Economic Association and John Wiley & Sons Australia, Ltd

Asian Economic Journal 2016, Vol.30 No. 1, 91–114 91

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opportunities stemming from the enhanced mobility of people, production inputs

and information when infrastructure is improved. As such, policy is often directed

to increase the number of roads. The present study maintains that the rehabilita-

tion of existing roads could also be welfare-enhancing.

The present paper is among th e very f‌irst attempts at empirically investigating

the relationship between road access and subjective well-being, using a nationally

representative household-level survey from Timor-Leste; namely, the 2007

Timor-Leste Survey of Living Standards (TSLS).

1

The salient feature of our

empirical exercise is that the notion of road access has two dimensions: quantity

and quality of roads. The former is measured by walk time (minutes) to main

roads as in Brereton et al. (2008), whereas the latter is proxied by whether house-

holds have access to roads during the rainy season and, hence, is in the spirit of

Dercon et al. (2009). In contrast to the past studies, we examine various aspects

of well-being, including adequacy of food, housing, clothing, healthcare, income

and child education, rather than overall life satisfaction. Our empirical framework

builds upon the standard model of ordered outcomes in which road access vari-

ables, together with other household-specif‌ic characteristics, enter the subjective

well-being equations. Based on ordered logit and probit estimates, we f‌ind robust

evidence that proximity to roads may not always enhance subjective well-being.

For some aspects like housing and health satisfaction, a shorter walk time to roads

leads to inferior well-being, highlighting potentially unfavorable consequences of

building more roads. Interestingly, access to roads during the rainy season appears

to be a much more signif‌icant contributing factor to subjective well-being in all

respects. Specif‌ically, the marginal effects indicate that provision of all-weather

road accessibility reduces the probability of households reporting a ‘less than ad-

equate’response to subjective measures of well-being by approximately 13–25

percent. Furthermore, all-weather access to roads increases the probability of ‘just

adequate’and ‘more than adequate’responses by 13–24 percent and 0.3–3.0 per-

cent, respectively.

There are at least two main contributions of this paper. First, the present paper,

to the best of our knowledge, is the f‌irst to consider the quality of roads in the re-

lationship between road access and subjective well-being. Second, the f‌indings of-

fer a clearer insight into how transportation infrastructure can be translated into

improved well-being and standards of living. In the context of a post-conf‌lict,

newly emerging economy like Timor-Leste, the answer to this inquiry is critical

because appropriate transport infrastructure development strategies will be an im-

portant foundation of national development and improvements in Timorese well-

being. Based on our main f‌indings, Timor-Leste is in dire need of better, and not

necessarily more, roads. Hence, public investment priorities should be devoted to

1 As discussed later in this paper, the 2007 TSLS is the second wave and the latest availableinfor-

mation at the time of writing. Although the reported household identif‌ication numbers do not allow us

to pool the 2007 TSLS with its preceding survey, the 2001 TSLS, we employthe 2001 TSLS to rep-

licate our empirical strategies for a robustness check. The results are discussed in Subsection V.3.

ASIAN ECONOMIC JOURNAL 92

© 2016 East Asian Economic Association and John Wiley & Sons Australia, Ltd