completion of the community works, a URRAP contractor engaged by the woreda carries out the remainder of the construction.<sup>7</sup> We focus on rural roads developed between 2010 and 2014. During the initial four years of the URRAP program, the Ethiopian government developed rural roads in about 4,000 communities, reaching nearly 20,000 km in total (Table 1). The number of communities in which any segment of newly developed or upgraded roads was 1,850 (or 13 percent of the total number of rural communities) between 2010 and 2012 and 2,205 (15 percent) between 2012 and 2014.<sup>8</sup> Among the nine regions analyzed, Oromia has the largest number of communities (around 2,500) that received rural roads between 2010 and 2014. The total length of the rural roads developed in Oromia during the period was about 13,000 km, accounting for 64 percent of the total length in the nine regions.

A recent report (World Bank 2018b) shows that connectivity and accessibility of rural Ethiopians have substantially improved since 2010. The average travel time to the nearest town decreased by nearly 30 minutes between 2010 and 2016. An additional 6 percent of rural Ethiopians were connected to rural roads during the same period, as the rural accessibility index (RAI) increased from 46 in 2010 to 52 in 2016.<sup>9</sup> As a result, market accessibility improved except for some lagging regions.<sup>10</sup> Although a glance of Figure 1 gives the impression that rural road development has taken place all around the country, a comparison of baseline community characteristics illustrates that recent rural road development occurred in communities that were already relatively well connected prior to the placement (Table 2). For example, the communities that have received rural roads (i.e., treated communities) since 2010 were located closer to the nearest towns (91 minutes), compared to the other communities (i.e., untreated communities, 196 minutes). The length of rural roads was already longer in treated communities as of 2010. In addition, treated communities were located in woredas with higher population density. On the other hand, treated communities (or woredas they belong to) were not necessarily better-off in terms of poverty, educational level, and infrastructure and basic services. Nevertheless, this comparison clearly indicates the need to take account of the nonrandom placement in evaluating the impact of rural road development (discussed more in Section 3).

> 7 In addition to the URRAP, the Productive Safety Net Program (PSNP)—a large social protection project providing transfers to food insecure areas—also has a component of rural road construction. Those roads are generally earth roads for very low traffic levels, connecting watersheds to kebeles and other service centers. Some feeder roads were constructed under the Agricultural Growth Program (AGP), which is a program focusing on increasing sustainable agriculture growth in potentially rich, but underdeveloped woredas of the country. See World Bank (2018) for a comprehensive review of Ethiopia’s rural road programs.

8 The identification of URRAP and other rural roads is based on the Ethiopia road database. The total length of those roads does not necessarily correspond to the official records. Somali region and a part of Amhara and Oromia regions are not included for this study due to data availability.

9 The RAI was measured by the share of population in each community who lives within 2km from any allweather road. The calculated RAI differs from World Bank (2016) due to the definitions of all-weather roads, as well as the coverages of roads and geographic areas.

10 Market accessibility index (MAI) was calculated for each community as the sum of the population in the other communities within a certain travel time, as in Donaldson and Hornbeck (2016) and Berge, Blankespoor, and Selod (2016).

5