Measuring Job Accessibility : Different Methods and New Data

Overview & Synopsis

The paper reexamines how to measure job accessibility in environments with limited data availability and applies different methods to Antananarivo, the capital of Madagascar. Job creation and accessibility are attracting renewed interest in developing countries, where unemployment rates remain persistently high. The paper finds two types of job accessibility measures that particularly impact employment: proximity to public transport and average travel time weighted by available job opportunities. For the latter, the paper also finds that new open-source data, such as the Open Buildings data set, are effective in identifying existing job opportunities. Using the measured results, the marginal impact of job accessibility on employment is estimated at about -0.05 to -0.06 after the potential endogeneity of accessibility measures is controlled.