HIV and access to road (WITHDRAWN)

Elodie Djemai, University of Michigan

Using GIS and HIV data from six African countries, we estimate the effect of road proximity on HIV. Access to roads is shown to improve knowledge of STI transmission and availability of condoms, but also increase the propensity to engage in casual sex. The latter effect more than offsets the former, so that at distance mean, a one standard deviation increase in distance to the nearest road decreases the risk of HIV infection by 0.6 percentage point. Results are robust to controlling for endogenous road placement, using slope and ruggedness as instrumental variables. Migration and endogenous individual placement are also discussed.