Infrastructure Improvements and Maize Market Integration: Bridging the Zambezi in Mozambique

• Main Authors: Jones, S. (Author), Salazar, C. (Author)
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: John Wiley and Sons Inc 2021
• Subjects: agricultural market performance; agricultural performance; agricultural price; economic integration; experiment; infrastructural development; infrastructure; maize; Namibia; natural experiment; prices; transportation infrastructure; Zambezi
• Online Access: View Fulltext in Publisher

 Historically, transport infrastructure connecting the most agriculturally productive areas of Mozambique and the richer southern region has been poor. A primary bottleneck was an unreliable ferry service over the Zambezi river, addressed by construction of a road bridge in 2009. In this paper we identify the impact of this transport infrastructure enhancement on integration of national maize markets. Applying a dyadic regression approach, we find a significant narrowing of equilibrium price differences among market pairs that experienced a large relative reduction in journey times due to the new bridge. We also estimate that the elasticity of the absolute price differential with respect to intermarket driving times is around 30%. As such, the new bridge infrastructure enhanced market integration by shrinking the “internal border” at the river, but such benefits were spatially limited. © 2020 The Authors. American Journal of Agricultural Economics published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc. on behalf of Agricultural & Applied Economics Association.