Poverty and Access to Roads in Papua New Guinea

Publisher Website
Google Scholar
Abstract
In this paper, our overall goal is to understand how effective access to infrastructure, especially roads, is in reducing poverty in PNG. To meet this goal, we examine poverty in PNG and seek to show the relationship between poverty and access to roads, measured as traveling time from a community to the nearest road. In our analysis, we test whether or not access to infrastructure is a significant factor in a household's poverty status in order to better understand what policies will be effective in overcoming poverty in PNG. Our results show that poverty in PNG is primarily rural and is associated with those in communities with poor access to services, markets, and transportation. Our simulations illustrate that improving average years of schooling and literacy leads to declines in poverty. Increasing access to roads is also found to reduce poverty. The results are robust to the way that we measure consumption, set the poverty line, run our experiments, and control for the possible endogeneity of access to roads in the consumption equation.