Complementarities in Infrastructure: Evidence from Rural India

Complementarities between infrastructure projects have been understudied. Our paper examines interactions in the impacts of large-scale road construction, electrification, and mobile phone coverage programs in rural India. We find strong evidence of complementary impacts between roads and electricity on agricultural production: dry season cropping increases significantly when villages receive both, but not when they receive one without the other. These complementarities are associated with a shift of cropping patterns towards market crops and with improved economic conditions. In contrast, we find no consistent evidence of complementarities for the mobile coverage program. 1This project has benefited from support by EUR grant ANR-17-EURE-0001, the International Growth Center, and CEPREMAP. Jamie-Hansen Lewis and Nitin Bharti provided excellent research assistance for this project. 2Paris School of Economics, CNRS. Email: o.vandeneynde@psemail.eu. 3Paris School of Economics, INRAE. Email: liamwrenlewis@gmail.com