Quantifying the Road Influence Zone on Socio‐economic Developments in Rural Tigray, Ethiopia

Abstract The road influence zone has been used to analyze the influence of roads on ecological and environmental effects but not on socio‐economic conditions. In a first study of its kind, we measured the extent and type of relationship underlying the road influence zone of rural roads on socio‐economic outcomes. Four indicators — namely, trip per capita, use of fertilizers, motorized transport and commercial activities — and three indicators — namely, road dust, flooding and erosion — have been used to analyze the positive and negative effects of roads respectively. Four rural roads and 529 households from four tabias were surveyed and we used piecewise and linear regressions to determine delineation of road influence zones. Except for trips per capita and erosion, threshold effects were observed for the rest of the outcome variables. The road influence zone ranges from 240 meters on both sides of the road in the case of road dust to about 2.6 kilometers in the case of motorized transport. The study results suggest that socio‐economic impacts of roads differ not only on socio‐economic and wealth differences of households but also on distance to road.