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New World Development paper co-authored by Christopher Adam, Douglas Gollin explores public investment in Tanzania

A new paper by Christopher Adam and Douglas Gollin of ODID and David Bevan of St John’s College, Oxford, exploring the impact of public investment on household welfare in Tanzania has been published in World Development.

'Rural-Urban Linkages, Public Investment and Transport Costs: The Case of Tanzania' uses a spatial general equilibrium model to examine how different public investment packages, combined with reforms in the transport sector, affect household welfare across the diverse geography of Tanzania and impact the processes of structural transformation the country is undergoing. 

Choices over investment financing have powerful distributional impacts since tax incidence, relative price and real exchange rate movements are non-neutral. The authors show that these distributional consequences may matter more in terms of household welfare than the direct consequences of targeting investment to particular sectors or locations.

Christopher Adam, David Bevan & Douglas Gollin (2016) 'Rural–Urban Linkages, Public Investment and Transport Costs: The Case of Tanzania' in World Development, DOI: 10.1016/j.worlddev.2016.08.013