Europe is lagging behind other developed economies in the availability and use of very fast broadband services. The recently introduced Digital Agenda for Europe initiative sets forward ambitious targets for the development of super-fast broadband infrastructures in Europe to foster smart and...

Climate change is expected to have significant impacts on Europe that will affect its economic sectors and the distribution of economic activity. While some of those climate-change impacts can be alleviated by mitigation action, some degree of climate change cannot be avoided anymore. This makes...

We set out to decompose government investment, seeking especially to estimate how much governments in Europe invest in infrastructure in general and transport infrastructure in particular. It is concluded that infrastructure accounts for about one-third of overall government investment in the EU...

Volume 13 of the EIB Papers contains the results of the 2008 EIB Conference on "Infrastructure investment, growth and cohesion". Issue 1 discusses the volume, composition, determinants and growth effects of government and infrastructure investment and highlights the economic cost of funds and...

Theoretical literature suggests a variety of reasons why a public-private partnership (PPP)should exhibit higher costs of construction than traditionally procured public infrastructure projects. The bundling of construction and operation contracts in a PPP give the private partner greater...

We examine the evolution of public investment and public capital stocks in Europe during the past three decades. Against this background, we employ an array of econometric techniques to assess the macroeconomic determinants of public investment, with a special focus on its long-term trend. We...

This paper offers an updated description of the macroeconomic and sectoral significance of PPPs in Europe, without assessing PPPs from a normative perspective. It shows that, over the past fifteen years, more than one thousand PPP contracts have been signed in the EU, representing a capital...

We take stock of what is known about public investment in the member states of the European Union, old and new alike. The interesting features about the long-term evolution of public investment have been its downtrend in old EU member states, bar the cohesion countries, and its volatility in new...

This paper provides an overview of both theoretical and empirical literature on the link between public investment (capital) and economic growth (national income). We first survey the channels through which public capital can conceivably affect growth. We then turn to reviewing the existing...

This paper investigates whether there is a lack of public capital in European Union countries. The analysis builds on a new database providing internationally comparable capital stock estimates for 22 OECD countries, among these 14 EU countries, for the period 1960-2001. A simple model of...