Roads do not always lead to riches, suggests Mukherjee on Financial Express
Financial Express cited a study co-authored by Associate Professor Abhiroop Mukherjee, IEMS Faculty Associate and Department of Finance. Policy-makers assume financing will follow once roads are built, and facilitate best use of new productive opportunities created by new road connectivity. Yet many rural and agrarian economies suffer from chronic problems of financing. Therefore, a key question remains: if you build it (roads), will they (financing) come? Even if financing does follow infrastructure improvements, who will it benefit: the relatively rich villagers or the poorer villagers who were excluded from formal finance to begin with? These questions are of immense relevance to policy-makers but remain under-explored in extant research.
Read the full article by Financial Express here.
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