This paper aims to establish the structural relationships between rural transport infrastructure (RTI) development and rural growth in the short-to medium long-term. The potential linkages between rural roads improvements and transformative rural development as measured by agricultural productivity are tested by using a matching approach.

This paper tests the linkage between a binary treatment (rural road improvement project) and a continuous outcome (cotton productivity) in Zambia’s agro-based Eastern Province as measured by repeated cross-sections of farm-level data from the Zambian post-harvest survey (PHS).