Perhaps the greatest development in rural communication technology in the middle of the 19 th century was an eight foot board tied to the back of a horse. The King Road Drag scraped along country roads leveling humps and filling potholes. 1 The flat roads permitted rural postal deliveries, the development of parcel post and eventually a flood of information from catalog companies and publishers...

Earlier work has found that social capital reduces traffic fatality risk (Nagler 2013a, Nagler 2013b). Recognizing that rural areas suffer from high traffic fatality levels despite a perceived high density of communal ties, we explore here whether social capital provides the same protection against traffic risks on rural roads as on urban roads, and what factors might explain differential effec...

This conference paper presents an accident study investigating where fatal alcoholand drugrelated accidents occur with respect to traffic environment (i.e., urban versus rural), road type, speed limit, annual average daily traffic flow, and road category. The study uses data from indepth studies of fatal accidents and from the Swedish National Road Database. Accident data from the 2006–2009 per...

Are roads key to raising living standards in poor rural areas? This study evaluates the impact of the World Bank–financed Viet Nam rural transport project I, a large-scale rural roads rehabilitation project that aims to reduce poverty. The analysis will focus on the welfare impacts of rural roads as an input to policy discussion about how best to allocate scarce public resources for poverty red...

Are roads the key to raising living standards in poor rural areas? This study evaluates the impact of the World Bank–financed Viet Nam rural transport project I, a large-scale rural roads rehabilitation project that aims to reduce poverty. The analysis will focus on the welfare impacts of rural roads as an input to policy discussion about how best to allocate scarce public resources for poverty...

There is a consensus on the importance of rural roads when increasing economic growth and household welfare. However, little is known regarding the positive effect these roads will have on the welfare of households in Viet Nam. This paper aims to measure that effect. It is known that rural roads help households increase per capita income and working hours. The estimated impact of these roads on...