Road Efficiency and Territorial Economic Transformation in a Landlocked Region: Mobility, Agriculture and Productive Recomposition in Kwango Province (DR Congo), 1990–2023

Abstract

This article examines how road-network expansion, relative technical efficiency, mobility, and agricultural production jointly characterize territorial economic transformation in Kwango Province, Democratic Republic of the Congo, from 1990 to 2023. The rural-roads literature has extensively documented the effects of accessibility on markets, agriculture, and labour allocation, while frontier-efficiency studies assess the relative productive performance of infrastructure. Yet these two perspectives are seldom combined to evaluate network expansion, productive efficiency, and territorial recomposition simultaneously in a landlocked setting. The study therefore asks: how do road-network expansion, changes in bias-corrected technical efficiency, mobility, and agricultural production combine in Kwango’s territorial economic transformation? The initial dataset contains 136 quarterly observations covering 1990Q1-2023Q4. To avoid pseudo-precision arising from the temporal reconstruction of some series, the main territorial analysis is conducted on 34 annual observations from 1990 to 2023. Efficiency is measured using an input-oriented VRS Window DEA with six windows and is subsequently bias-corrected by bootstrap. The empirical strategy also uses per-kilometre intensity indicators, Kruskal-Wallis tests with effect sizes, Holm-adjusted Mann-Whitney comparisons, Kendall’s tau, and robust Theil-Sen slopes with 95% confidence intervals. The results reveal a marked decoupling. Between the endpoints of the study period, road length rises from 2,316 to 8,282 km, an increase of 257.6%, whereas the corrected VRS score falls by approximately 54.6%. Traffic intensity per kilometre declines by about 50.3%, cash-crop production falls by 89.7%, and its share of observed agricultural output decreases by about 79.9%. Food-crop production follows a more resilient path, pointing to an asymmetric productive recomposition. These relationships are not interpreted causally because the DEA score is itself constructed from road length, traffic, and the agricultural outputs under study. The article therefore identifies a partial territorial transformation in which infrastructure accumulation alone does not guarantee productive mobilisation. A key managerial implication follows: road planning should complement kilometres built with measures of efficiency, use intensity, productive connectivity, all-season passability, and maintenance.

JEL Classification: R42; R58; O18; Q12.

Paper type: Empirical quantitative research.