This paper provides an impact evaluation of poor rural area feeder road (aid for trade) development project in Zambia and contributes to the debate about the role of rural transport infrastructure development in explaining the long-term rural development.

There is value-added to consider this debate at the micro level within a country as particularly questions of parameter heterogeneity and unobserved heterogeneity are likely to be smaller than between countries. Moreover, at the micro level it is possible to identify more precise transmission mechanisms from rural transport infrastructure to socio-economic development outcomes. This is done empirically by analysing a  rural development project in Zambia’s Eastern Province running from 1997-2002.

The secondary datasets consist of respectively a series of repeated cross-sectional living conditions monitoring surveys (LCMSs). The aim of the research is to assess the ability of the parametric and semiparametric models as well as using a time-series of cross-sections to provide an adequate description  of the logarithm of per adult equivalent consumption of rural household conditional on few covariates, including an  infrastructure treatment dummy variable.