Infrastructure and Growth in Developing Countries: Recent Advances and Research Challenges

By Stéphane Straub. 2008

360 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper presents a survey of recent research on the economics of infrastructure in developing countries. Energy, transport, telecommunications, water and sanitation are considered. The survey covers two main set of issues: the linkages between infrastructure and economic growth (at the economy-wide, regional and sectoral level) and the composition, sequencing and efficiency of alternative infrastructure investments, including the arbitrage between new investments and maintenance expenditures; OPEX and CAPEX, and public versus private investment. Following the introduction, section 2 discusses the theoretical foundations (growth theory and new economic geography). Section 3 assesses the analysis of 140 specifications from 64 recent empirical papers-examining type of data used, level of aggregation, econometric techniques and nature of the sample-and discusses both the macro-econometric and micro-econometric contributions of these papers. Finally section 4 discusses directions for future research and suggests priorities in data development.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Media Technology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/28f02980632d573f4e9afc27b462a7632cd7dff6

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Citations in the corpus

Assessing the impact of infrastructure quality on firm productivity in Africa: cross-country comparisons based on investment climate surveys from 1999 to 2005 (2010, background): “As Straub (2008) signals, macro level literature has too often sought to obtain the elasticity of infrastructure capital and compare it with the elasticity of private capital.”
Taxation, corruption, and growth (2016, neutral): “Representative studies include Helms (1985), Barro (1990, 1991), Mofidi and Stone (1990), Barro and Sala-i-Martin (1995), Mauro (1995, 1998), Fisman and Gatti (2002), Gordon and Lee (2007), Straub (2008, 2011), Hassett and Mathur (2008), and Hauner and Kyobe (2010).”
Investing in public investment: an index of public investment efficiency (2012, neutral): “…not only directly raise the productivity of human and physical capital (for example, roads provide access to remote areas making private investment possible), but also indirectly, through lower transportation costs which increase economies of scale, productivity, and thus growth (Straub, 2008).”
Infrastructure Public–Private Partnerships in the Developing World: Lessons from Recent Experience (2015, background): “…has emerged: a review of 64 studies between 1989 and 2007 noted that two-thirds of authors found a positive, statistically significant relationship between infrastructure investment and economic growth or some other measure of economic development (for example, productivity) (Straub, 2008).”
Infrastructure and Development: A Critical Appraisal of the Macro-level Literature (2008, methodology): “The discussion draws in part on analysis of 30 macro-level studies of the link between infrastructure and economic performance (for details see Online Appendix and Straub, 2008).”
Public Investment, Growth, and Debt Sustainability: Putting Together the Pieces (2012, methodology): “…generally find a much stronger positive relationship between growth and physical indicators of infrastructure than between growth and capital stock series calculated via the perpetual inventory method, as reviewed by Straub (2008).21 We thus allow for inefficiencies in public capital creation.”
The Impact of Infrastructure on Trade and Economic Growth in Selected Economies in Asia (2015, background): “In a similar study, Straub (2008) examined the impact of infrastructure investment on East Asia’s economic growth using a growth-accounting framework and cross-country regression. Although the study used a similar set of economies as Seethepalli, Bramati, and Veredas (2008), the findings showed no s”
Does aid for trade enhance export performance? Investigating on the infrastructure channel (2012, neutral): “Geography will be captured by two groups of variables related to the shape of a country and to urban economics (Straub, 2008).”