Tillmann von Carnap's thesis available for download

The thesis "Markets and marketplaces: Essays on access and transformation in remote rural economies" consists of four chapters.

Following an extraordinary global reduction in extreme poverty over the last century, progress on eliminating poverty has slowed. The latest figures show that the number of extremely poor people has in fact risen in sub-Saharan Africa, and an ever-larger share of them lives in remote rural areas. Tillmann's thesis consists of four chapters asking how people in such regions can efficiently get access to income opportunities and essential services. 

Empirically studying remote rural areas is challenging, because – almost by definition – data is scarce. Measurement of outcomes is typically based on household surveys, which provide great detail, yet often capture only specific moments in time and are, due to their costly collection, limited in scope. Therefore, another theme connecting the four chapters is their reliance on various forms of satellite data which can help overcome these critical data scarcities. 

 

Market access and agricultural intensification: Remotely-sensed evidence from Mozambican river crossings

The first chapter considers the effects of a common rural development policy – improving market access, for example through road construction – on agricultural intensification. The literature has repeatedly found that such improvements only have small impacts on agricultural supply, possibly because factors other than market access hold back intensification. I use satellite-derived indicators of agricultural land use to show that in the context of northern Mozambique, unreliable market access due to frequently flooded river crossings holds back more intensive land use, but only in areas predisposed to sell to large towns. The results suggest that market access programs intended to increase agricultural supply should target areas relatively close to existing demand. 

 

Remotely-sensed market activity as a high-frequency economic indicator in remote rural areas

The second chapter builds on the realization that economists tend to conceptualize market access in a way that differs starkly from reality in many remote rural areas. Here, buyers and sellers often meet at dedicated marketplaces, for example every week. Because these trade hubs lie in remote areas, however, we lack consistent maps and measures of activity that could help us understand patterns and trends in rural trading and overall economic activity. To address these gaps, I develop a methodology using satellite imagery to map rural marketplaces across countries and track their activity over time. I show that the method accurately detects marketplaces in a validation sample, and present applications of the activity monitoring to conflict and the Covid-19 pandemic. 

 

Rural marketplaces and local development

In the third chapter, I ask how these marketplaces shape their surroundings in the long run, and how they interact with other policies for market access. For the former, I combine my contemporary market maps with ones for 1970 from Kenya, building the first panel of marketplace existence over such a long period. Using fine-grained population density estimates, I show that while there are a third fewer marketplaces operating today than 50 years ago, population concentrated around marketplaces as nuclei of rural towns. I turn to a spatial model to understand why some marketplaces disappear and others survive and show that marketplaces are particularly likely to turn into hubs of rural non-agricultural production if they are well-connected to their hinterland, but far from existing centres of production. This suggests that policymakers can amplify the effects of market access policies such as road construction by taking the existing distribution of marketplaces into account. 

 

Weather shocks, child mortality and adaptation: Experimental evidence from Uganda

The fourth and final chapter shifts attention from accessing markets to accessing healthcare. People in remote rural areas are especially vulnerable to a changing climate, where increasingly unpredictable rains affect agriculture and the disease environment. It remains an open question, however, what modes of provision can effectively mitigate the adverse health consequences of climate change. The paper shows that in the context of Uganda, child mortality is 76% higher in periods with below-average rainfall compared to above-average periods, but that in places which were randomly assigned a community health worker, this gap disappears almost entirely. This suggests that community health workers can efficiently provide the health services to protect vulnerable populations from some of the adverse effects of climate change. 

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Tillmann will defend his thesis on 1 June 2023.

Click here for more information on the defense