While rural road upgrading is expected to improve accessibility to other areas, it remains uncertain how an improved road network alters out-migration and remittance inflows in distant areas and transforms local income-generating activities. We utilize a dataset collected under a quasi-experimental setting to measure the impact of road improvement in rural Morocco. We find that out-migration from and remittance inflows to very rural areas decrease after road improvement, while migration and remittances are less affected in areas closer to urban areas. Next, we explore the mechanism underlying this change after confirming that road upgrading enhances traffic access to other areas. We observe that households living in remote areas increase their focus on agricultural activities in order to sell more agricultural products in local markets and reduce their reliance on non-agricultural work. In contrast, households located closer to urban areas are more likely to be self-employed. These findings demonstrate that better access to markets through rural road improvements has different impacts on migration and remittances at different locations, which is relevant to the issue of employment reallocation by physical infrastructure.
Shimizutani et al. (Fri,) studied this question.