Essays on economic development, violence and infrastructure

Abstract

The purpose of this thesis is to develop a deeper understanding of the relationship between economic development, infrastructure development - with a particular focus on roads and electricity - and potentially mitigating factors such as insurrectional violence and corrup- tion. My approach is empirical. For Chapters 1 and 2, I digitalised archival road maps and collected satellite night light data to produce objective measures of development programs output. In Chapter 3, we use household electricity consumption data of rural Rwandan communities. Leveraging this data, I shed light on the effectiveness of development pro- grams, public or private, local or regional, using various econometric approaches, ranging from Instrumental Variable to OLS. In the first chapter, I explore the link between infrastructure development programs and violence. I examine empirically the direct and indirect effects of physical road building and road spending programs on violence in Iraq from 2003 to 2016 using both an instrumental variable (IV) and a first-difference and approach. In the second chapter, I try to answer the following questions: does corruption affect economic development? If so, to what extent and why? I delve into the Iraqi setting and leverage the data collected for Chapter 1 to measure corruption. First, I build a novel in- dex of corruption per district. Then I proceed to test the relationship between this index of leakage and health and literacy outcomes. Using an event-study approach, I compare the differential impact of development programs on illiteracy and child malnutrition in cor- rupt and non-corrupt Iraqi districts and find that corruption alters development programs’ efficiency. In the third and last chapter, we study electricity consumption behaviours of rural com- munities connected to a distributed nanogrid system in Rwanda. We use a novel household level electricity consumption dataset of over 4,000 users in close to 80 communities in Rwanda collected by a solar nanogrid system provider to identify a sharing behaviour.