Infrastructure and economic growth in East Asia

Stephane Straub, Charles Vellutini () and Michael Warlters

No 4589, Policy Research Working Paper Series from The World Bank

Abstract: This paper examines whether infrastructure investment has contributed to East Asia's economic growth using both a growth accounting framework and cross-country regressions. For most of the variables used, both the growth accounting exercise and cross-country regressions fail to find a significant link between infrastructure, productivity and growth. These conclusions contrast strongly with previous studies finding positive and significant effect for all infrastructure variables in the context of a production function study. This leads us to conclude that results from studies using macro-level data should be considered with extreme caution. The Authors suggest that infrastructure investment may have had the primary function of relieving constraints and bottlenecks as they arose, as opposed to directly encouraging growth.

Keywords: Transport Economics Policy&Planning; Banks&Banking Reform; Achieving Shared Growth; Economic Theory&Research; Non Bank Financial Institutions (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2008-04-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dev and nep-sea
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (37)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wbk:wbrwps:4589

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