This paper provides a methodological tool to support the collection and preparation of standardized, comprehensive data regarding public spending on infrastructure services that can be rigorously compared across countries. Infrastructure is defined to cover six sectors: irrigation, energy...

In the past half a century, Egypt has experienced remarkable progress in the provision of infrastructure in all areas, including transportation, telecommunication, power generation, and water and sanitation. Judging from an international perspective, Egypt has achieved an infrastructure status...

Cities exist, grow, and prosper because they take advantage of scale economies and specialization wrought by agglomeration. But output growth inevitably stresses transport infrastructure because production requires space and mobility. To prevent congestion from crowding out agglomeration...

Between 2000 and 2005 infrastructure made an important contribution of 1.6 percentage points to Benin's improved per capita growth performance, which was the highest among West African countries during the period. Raising the country's infrastructure endowment to that of the region's...

This paper offers an empirical evaluation of the output contribution of infrastructure. Drawing from a large data set on infrastructure stocks covering 88 countries and spanning the years 1960-2000, and using a panel time-series approach, the paper estimates a long-run aggregate production...

Natural resource abundance can lead to strong economic growth if resource rents are well invested in physical assets and other forms of productive capital. This paper focuses on the case of the resource-abundant economies in Eurasia, which has been less documented in the literature on natural...

Academics and policy makers have long considered an adequate supply of infrastructure services to be essential for economic development. This paper reviews recent theoretical and empirical literature on the effects of infrastructure development on growth and income distribution. The theoretical...

If the South Asia region hopes to meet its development goals and not risk slowing down or even halting growth, poverty alleviation, and shared prosperity, it is essential to make closing its huge infrastructure gap a priority. Identifying and addressing gaps in the data on expenditure, access,...

Using bilateral migration flow data from the 2010 population census of Nepal, this paper provides evidence on the importance of public infrastructure and services in determining migration flows. The empirical specification, based on a generalized nested logit model, corrects for the non-random...

In a context of rapid urbanization and energy transition, massive investments will be required to develop efficient public transport networks. Capturing the increase in land value caused by transport infrastructure (for example, through a betterment tax) appears a promising way to finance public...