Region: Global
Country: Global / Non-Specific
Keywords: About PPP **, Knowledge Lab ***, Financing and Risk Mitigation **
Document(s):
Document Summary:
This paper is structured as follows. It discusses previous efforts at estimating infrastructure spending, explain the available data sets as well as their relative advantages, compare the results obtained using these data sets, and propose methods to combine them to “triangulate” and improve accuracy. It then uses the uniquely detailed BOOST fiscal data to provide some trend analysis and discuss some budgeting challenges. A final section concludes and discusses potential directions for further strengthening the understanding of what countries spend on infrastructure and the use that can be made of such data.
Document Details:
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.
Updated: April 12, 2022