Markets and marketplaces : Essays on access and transformation in remote rural economies

Sammanfattning: Market access and agricultural intensification: Remotely-sensed evidence from Mozambican river crossingsMany believe that high transport costs are a significant constraint to agricultural intensification in rural Africa. Empirical evidence is limited, however, because areas with high agricultural potential may see more infrastructure improvements and data is rarely available at the necessary granularity. We use satellite imagery to measure agricultural outcomes in Mozambique, where inadequate river crossings create discrete jumps in travel costs between banks. We find that better-connected banks have 4.1% more land under cultivation than worse-connected counterparts. Improved access thus leads to intensified land use, albeit at the potential cost of lost natural lands. Remotely-sensed market activity as a high-frequency economic indicator in remote rural areasEffective targeting of social policies and their rigorous evaluation require relevant and accurate data. With the majority of the world's poor depending on agriculture and informal businesses for their livelihoods, information on these sectors is particularly valuable. I use high-frequency satellite imagery to map rural marketplaces across large geographies and track activity within them in real-time. Measured activity not only displays intuitive variation with respect to exogenous shocks, but also deepens the temporal and geographical detail at which remote sensing-based analyses are possible. Rural marketplaces and local developmentMarketplaces are an age-old way to connect geographically separated producers and consumers, and they remain widespread in low-income countries. How do these gatherings shape development around them? To address long-standing data gaps, I combine historical sources with novel satellite-based methods to map marketplaces and measure local population density, establishing three stylized facts for Kenya over the last five decades. First, while rural population quadrupled, two thirds of weekly markets operating in 1970 no longer do so today. Second and despite many markets no longer operating, population concentrated on average around markets that were active in 1970. Third, markets further from large cities saw the most population concentration relative to their surroundings. To rationalize these findings and derive policy implications, I extend a model of rural-urban trade with markets as population-independent locations that aggregate otherwise sparse supply and demand and enable scale economies in transportation. The model explains when new markets emerge, why some markets decline, and which complementary policies catalyze markets for local development.Weather shocks, child mortality and adaptation: Experimental evidence from UgandaClimate change increases the intensity and frequency of extreme weather events. With growing understanding of their health consequences, effective adaptation policies are needed. Combining data from a randomized trial inducing spatial variation in the availability of community-healthcare with data from a natural experiment inducing variation in growing-season precipitation, we assess the effect of investment in basic community healthcare to protect the poor from adverse consequences. We find that the risk of infant death following a rainfall deficit season fell by 46% in treatment relative to control villages. Thus, investments in basic healthcare in a low-income context can reduce the risk of weather-induced child mortality.