We present an open economy growth model incorporating various elements of fiscal policy, including government expenditure on education and public capital (infrastructure), budget deficit, internal and external public debt, public consumption, and four tax rates. This detailed description of...

Exploiting the economic dividends of the mega-infrastructure investments related to the Belt and Road Initiative as a timely global South-South cooperation model, this study follows the New Structural Economics theory to examine the effects of the BRI membership on Africa's industrialization. A...

What determines the aggregate and distributional effects of new transportation infrastructure? One key overlooked channel is the role that infrastructure policy plays in changing the incentives of firms to enter, exit, and grow--in turn generating endogenous changes in local productivity. In...

Using rich geospatial data and causal machine learning (ML), this paper maps potential economic benefits from incremental investments in all major types of public and economic infrastructure across Africa. These 'infrastructure potential maps' cover all African populated areas at a spatial...

This report explores key challenges and priorities in safeguarding Europe's critical energy infrastructure against both physical and cyber threats amid rising geopolitical tensions. It follows recent sabotage incidents and the extensive development of new offshore energy infrastructure planned...

The recent debates on infrastructure spending have led to renewed interest in the measurement of infrastructure and its effects on growth and well-being. This paper updates estimates of one important type of infrastructure capital—highways and streets. We compare BEA's capital measures with...

This paper builds on a previous paper by the authors (Kornfeld and Fraumeni, 2022) that primarily used U.S. Federal Highway Administration Highway Statistics data to disaggregate investment in highways and streets into more detailed types to produce updated estimates of net wealth stocks and...

What determines the relative gains from improving different parts of a transportation network? Ports and roads are key components of a country’s infrastructure to access international markets. I provide a framework to jointly estimate the quality of different ports and trade costs on normal...

Despite the sub-Saharan African (SSA) region's vast size in terms of human capital and physical capital resources, the industrial output growth in SSA still needs to catch up to the other regions. This is because of low productive skills and the dilapidated spread of infrastructural technology...

I investigate the social costs imposed by poor implementation of public infrastructure. Focusing on the period from 2005 to 2015 in Peru, when the government embarked on a nationwide initiative to expand sewerage systems, I leverage quasi-random variation in initiation of the implementation...

Community-driven reconstruction (CDR) is an approach to post-war reconstruction that gives discretion to local community councils in establishing priorities and overseeing the implementation of reconstruction and development activities. A series of methodologically exceptional studies has raised...

High hopes are pinned to mini-grids for rural electrification, especially in remote and sparsely populated areas. This note presents new evidence from a large evaluation of a US Millennium Challenge Corporation investment into mini-grids in Indonesia. We find that, a few years after...

The purpose of this paper is to identify the driving elements of the South African financial sector. While South Africa's financial sector appears robust, there exists a dearth of empirical research investigating the determinants of its development. Thus, this work assesses how three critical...

Making a comprehensive comparison of subnational levels of infrastructure development in the Philippines is difficult due to the uneven availability of data on infrastructure indicators across geo-political areas. This study shows that this is possible at the regional level by developing a...

This paper provides new evidence of the effects of road construction on both domestic and international trade flows in the People's Republic of China (PRC) using customs data and information on transport investments in the region, including those supported by multilateral development banks. We...

This paper revisits the instrumental variable (IV) approach in Lipscomb et al. (2013, 2021, LMB) to study the impacts of electrification. We first make corrections to the construction of the dataset, including the modelled IV. Revised estimates on main outcomes and mechanisms are statistically...

Public works programmes (PWPs) are widely used social protection instruments in low- and middle-income countries. Participants carry out temporary, labour-intensive works in exchange for cash or in-kind compensation. The available empirical evidence indicates that these programmes are usually...

In this paper we provide a simple and intuitive story for supply chain disruptions driven by the rigidities in the transportation sector. Focusing on maritime shipping, we argue that the frequent macroeconomic shocks that shape demand for transportation, meet a highly inelastic supply curve for...

The aim of this project is to identify the investment requirements for energy infrastructure across each TEN-E infrastructure category, as well as for non-TEN-E electricity transmission and distribution infrastructure, in order to enable a decarbonised economy in the EU. It also evaluates the...

Spätestens seit dem Einstieg des chinesischen Schiffskonzerns China Ocean Shipping Company (COSCO) im Hamburger Hafen wird die Rolle der Investitionskontrolle auch im Bereich maritimer Infrastrukturen öffentlich intensiv diskutiert. Als maritime Infrastrukturen werden gemeinhin...

A robust food traceability system is crucial for ensuring seamless information fow within supply chains. While the current centralised approach, typically led by a supply chain leader, facilitates information exchange, it faces signifcant limitations, such as prolonged tracing processes and a...

Malta's rapid growth over the past two decades has gone hand in hand with a significant expansion of the population. This has created bottlenecks in infrastructure, which will need to be addressed. While capacity in energy and water supply is currently adequate, investments in wastewater...

Purpose - The continuous export challenges due to the inadequate quality infrastructure have brought to the fore the importance of export facilitation-quality infrastructure. Different infrastructure investments have been implemented to facilitate export; however, the outcomes were different...

This paper examines the determinants of the spatial distribution of electric vehicle charging infrastructure in Germany, a key element in the transition to a low-carbon economy. Using postcode-level geographic data and regression analysis, we investigate how factors such as population density,...