Public infrastructure: definition, classification and measurement issues

Gianpiero Torrisi ()

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: Beginning from the end of the 1980s many studies analysing the relation between infrastructures endowment and economic development have been realised. A general consensus is achieved around the idea that basic infrastructure facilities are important features related to economic performance, although both magnitude and causality direction are debated. A peculiar feature of these studies is that, across them, different empirical and theoretical entities are referred to infrastructure. Although the vast body of literature on infrastructures economic impact have been largely reviewed less attention have been paid to the term infrastructure per se. This article, aiming to provide a helpful instrument to critically interpret the existing literature, zooms in on infrastructure definition and then reviews different categories of infrastructures utilised in literature, namely: personal, institutional, material, immaterial, economic, social, core and not-core, basic and complementary, network, nucleus, and territory infrastructures. The final part deals with problems related to infrastructures measurement describing some financial-based measures and physical-based measures highlighting that both measures - due to economic and strictly computational problems - present pitfalls so that, in turn, both types of measures have critical aspects to be considered when interpreting results concerning infrastructures.

Keywords: infrastructure; public expenditure (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H54 H76 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-pbe and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (17)

Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/12990/1/MPRA_paper_12990.pdf original version (application/pdf)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/25850/1/MPRA_paper_25850.pdf revised version (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:pra:mprapa:12990

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany Ludwigstraße 33, D-80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joachim Winter ().