AN ANALYSIS OF ECONOMIC INFRASTRUCTURE INVESTMENT IN SOUTH AFRICA
By P. Perkins, Johannes Fedderke, John M. Luiz. 2005
199 citations recorded by the source corpus.
This paper analyses long-term trends in the development of South Africa's economic infrastructure and discusses their relationship with the country's long-term economic growth. A database covering national accounts data, railways, roads, ports, air travel, phone lines and electricity was established for this purpose, and may facilitate further quantitative research. PSS (Pesaran, Shin and Smith, 1996, 2001) F-tests are used to identify directions of association between economic infrastructure and economic growth. These indicate long-run forcing relationships from public-sector economic infrastructure investment and fixed capital stock to gross domestic product (GDP), from roads to GDP, and from GDP to a range of other types of infrastructure. There is also evidence of potential simultaneity between specific types of infrastructure and GDP. The evidence suggests three main findings. Firstly, the relationship between economic infrastructure and economic growth appears to run in both directions. Inadequate investment in infrastructure could create bottlenecks, and opportunities for promoting economic growth could be missed. Secondly, South Africa's stock of economic infrastructure has developed in phases. Policymakers should focus on choosing or encouraging the right type of infrastructure at the right time. Thirdly, the need for investment in economic infrastructure never goes away. The maintenance and expansion of infrastructure are important dimensions of supporting economic activity in a growing economy, provided that individual projects are chosen on the basis of appropriate cost-benefit analyses. Copyright 2005 Economic Society of South Africa.
Subfields: Accounting, Economics and Econometrics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/afcd93e20f4945bfc7a87fb2ed02c4ba88b69d45
Citations in the corpus
- Telecommunications and economic growth: an empirical analysis of sub-Saharan Africa (2012, unknown): “Perkins et al. (2005) also identified a bi-directional causality in South Africa using a PSS F-test (Pesaran et al., 2001).”
- Infrastructure and growth in South Africa : direct and indirect productivity impacts of 19 infrastructure measures (2006, unknown): “Finally, South Africa is a developing country for which infrastructure data is available for long (1875-2000) time runs - see the discussion in Perkins et al (2005) - enabling the dynamics of long run growth processes to be explored.”
- South Africa's Export Performance: Determinants of Export supply (2006, unknown): “48 The data are sourced from Perkins (2003), Quantech (2004) and the World Development Indicators Paved roads and share roads paved are updated using data obtained from World Development Indicators.”