Evaluating the Impact of Rural Road Investment Projects on Household Welfare in Rural Area: Evidence from Fujian Province

The basic purpose of public investment in rural roads is to increase the social benefits in rural areas. However, it has been difficult to precisely quantify the size and especially the distribution of benefits from rural road investments, due to methodological constraints and data limitations. This paper presents a propensity-score matched double difference method to estimate the impact of Rural Roads Improvement Projects (RRIP) such as travel time, trip frequency, and income on rural households. Furthermore, a panel data surveying project and control villages before and after program implementation from Fujian Province is applied to estimate the welfare gain as an empirical approach, and we find that these methods can substantially reduce the bias found in non-experimental evaluations.