ON THE ECONOMIC EFFECTS OF PUBLIC INFRASTRUCTURE INVESTMENT: A SURVEY OF THE INTERNATIONAL EVIDENCE

This paper provides a survey of the significant literature on the effects of public infrastructure investment on economic performance and therefore constitutes a comprehensive reference for academic researchers and policy makers alike. It presents a comprehensive discussion of the empirical research regarding the impact of public infrastructure investment on economic performance in terms of both the methodological approaches followed and respective conclusions. It includes an integrated discussion of the methodological developments that successively have led to the estimation of production functions, cost and profit functions and, more recently, vector autoregressive models. Finally, it identifies some important areas for future research and highlights the natural convergence of this literature with the macroeconomic literature on the effects of fiscal policies.