Hitting the Trillion Mark -- A Look at How Much Countries Are Spending on Infrastructure

Marianne Fay, Hyoung Il Lee, Massimo Mastruzzi, Sungmin Han and Moonkyoung Cho

No 8730, Policy Research Working Paper Series from The World Bank

Abstract: The paper provides the first consistently estimated data set on infrastructure investments in low- and middle-income countries. To do so, the authors identify three possible proxies for infrastructure investments: two are variants on gross fixed capital formation from national accounts system data following ADB (2017) and one is based on fiscal data from the World Bank's BOOST database. Two of these proxies rely on the World Bank's Private Participation in Infrastructure database to capture the private share of infrastructure investments. Given the limitations of each of these proxies, the authors employ several transformations to derive a lower-bound estimate for infrastructure investments in low-and middle-income countries of 3.40 percent of their gross domestic product, a central estimate of around 4 percent, and an upper-bound estimate of 5 percent for 2011. Corresponding absolute amounts are US$0.82 trillion, US$1.00 trillion, and US$1.21 trillion, respectively with East Asia and the Pacific accounting for 55 percent of infrastructure investments and Africa 4 percent. The public sector largely dominates infrastructure spending, accounting for 87?91 percent of infrastructure investments, but with wide variation across regions, from a low of 53?64 percent in South Asia to a high of 98 percent in East Asia. Given the absence of fiscal or national accounts data capturing investments in infrastructure, these estimates are likely to be the best available in the near future. Nevertheless, the authors propose some possible avenues for future improvements (including an update when 2017 data are made available by the International Comparison Project), building on the excellent collaboration of multilateral development banks around this issue.

Keywords: Hydrology; Technology Industry; Technology Innovation; Public Sector Administrative and Civil Service Reform; State Owned Enterprise Reform; Public Sector Administrative&Civil Service Reform; Democratic Government; De Facto Governments; Economics and Finance of Public Institution Development; Transport Services; Health Care Services Industry (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019-02-01
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (16)

Downloads: (external link)
http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/970571549037261080/pdf/WPS8730.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wbk:wbrwps:8730

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Policy Research Working Paper Series from The World Bank 1818 H Street, N.W., Washington, DC 20433. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Roula I. Yazigi ().