Hitting the Trillion Mark : A Look at How Much Countries Are Spending on Infrastructure
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...
| Main Authors: | , , , , |
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| Language: | English |
| Published: |
World Bank, Washington, DC
2019
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/970571549037261080/Hitting-the-Trillion-Mark-A-Look-at-How-Much-Countries-Are-Spending-on-Infrastructure http://hdl.handle.net/10986/31234 |
| Summary: | 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. |
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