The paper argues that East Asia is setting the pace for the recent trend in regional and inter-regional integration, which is associated with multilateral infrastructure connectivity initiatives, like the "Belt and Road Initiative" (BRI) of the People's Republic of China and Japan's "Partnership...

Despite the dominant role of hydropower in the global power generation mix and the popularity of studying the productivity impact of infrastructure investment, there is a lack of research regarding the impact of hydropower projects on firm productivity. Such a positive impact could promote a...

We study the impacts of the 2009 monetary stimulus and its interaction with infrastructure spending on credit allocation. We develop a two-stage estimation approach and apply it to China's loanlevel data that covers all sectors in the economy. We find that except for the manufacturing sector,...

This paper discusses suggested ways to bring private sector finance into water supply and inland water transport. Typically, such water projects rely only on user charges as sources of revenues. For example, ships using inland waterways have to pay user charges to the government for port...

In many Asian countries, land acquisition is one of the main challenges for infrastructure development which delays the completion of projects and lowers the rate of return of infrastructure investment. This paper investigates the potential application of the land trust scheme, which Japan has...

This report discusses key issues around the mobilization of private capital for development. Investment requirements are huge, especially for infrastructure, climate and other SDG-related investments. External finance for developing countries stagnated in the years before the pandemic, followed...

Social infrastructure has endured a long period of neglect in most developed and emerging countries, with chronic underinvestment exposed by the coronavirus crisis 2020. The financial crisis 2007/08 led to a slow revival of economic infrastructure policies, and a growing involvement of...

Airports are an important factor of regional connectivity. Following the literature, a sufficiently dense airport network is an important determinant for growth. However, regional airports in Germany exhibit financial losses and depend on subsidies. This paper analyses the potential spillover...

We exploit exogenous variation arising from the historical rollout of the Swedish railroad network across municipalities to identify the impacts of lowered interaction costs on innovative activity. A network connection led to a surge in local innovation due to an increased entry, productivity,...

As China's opening-up grows wider under the Belt and Road Initiative, the exploration and construction of free trade ports have received increasing attention. In 2018, China's first free trade port was settled in Hainan instead of Shanghai. In 2019, after the Lingang New Area of China (Shanghai)...

Der öffentliche Sektor in Deutschland hat enorme Investitionsbedarfe, die auf rund 450 Mrd. Euro über die kommenden zehn Jahre geschätzt werden. Um diese Investitionen umzusetzen, ist ein Zehnjahresprogramm, finanziert über zusätzliche Kreditaufnahme, sinnvoll. Dafür sollte die...

While discussing the enhancement of the connectivity between Europe and Asia, this policy paper explores a new area of cooperation, which is the use of European long-term investment funds in Asia's infrastructure. We argue that, if Asian countries agree to offer 50% of their spillover revenue to...

In this paper, we analyze the impact of transportation infrastructure quantity and quality on regional economic production. We exploit an extensive panel dataset on the German county level (N=401), expressing the capital value and condition of highways between 2007 and 2016, to estimate a...

We study the effects of granting an exit option that enables the private party to early terminate a PPP project if it turns out to be financially loss-making. In a continuous-time setting with hidden information about operating profits, we show that an exit option, acting as a risk-sharing...

- Public investment has been badly neglected in Germany over the past two decades, with the result that the public capital stock no longer meets the standards of a modern economy and is inadequate for the challenges that will be posed by demographic change and Germany's international...

Public investment has been badly neglected in Germany over the past two decades, with the result that the public capital stock no longer meets the standards of a modern economy and is inadequate for the challenges that will be posed by demographic change and Germany’s international...

The paper provides an empirical analysis of factors affecting the use of capital market instruments for financing infrastructure public-private partnership (PPP) projects. The findings of the paper contain useful policy guidance as the data provides some evidence to suggest that banks play a...

This paper studies the causal effect of transport infrastructure on the spatial concentration of economic activity. Leveraging a new global dataset of geo-located Chinese government-financed projects over the period from 2000 to 2014 together with measures of spatial inequality based on...

This paper studies the causal effect of transport infrastructure on the spatial concentration of economic activity. Leveraging a new global dataset of geo-located Chinese government-financed projects over the period from 2000 to 2014 together with measures of spatial inequality based on...

The Recovery Fund recently proposed by the EU Commission marks a sea-change in European integration. Yet it will not be enough to meet the challenges Europe faces. There has been much public debate about financing, but little about the sort of concrete projects that the EU should be putting...

The Recovery Fund recently proposed by the EU Commission marks a sea-change in European integration. Yet it will not be enough to meet the challenges Europe faces. There has been much public debate about financing, but little about the sort of concrete projects that the EU should be putting...

The paper deals with the issue of how Japan is positioning itself in the emerging and contested field of international connectivity initiatives. It starts with surveying the emergence of the connectivity topic in recent years, paying attention to recent infrastructure initiatives in the...

We examine how highway accessibility influences tax policy. We exploit the stagewise expansion of the "Baltic Sea highway" in the East German state Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania as the largest contiguous highway construction project in Germany since 1945. For non-agglomeration municipalities...

Infrastructure construction is one of the basic driving forces of social and economic development. Since 1978, the construction of infrastructure in the People's Republic of China (PRC) has experienced rapid development, which has given a strong impetus to the PRC's modernization. But behind the...

This chapter discusses infrastructure development in the Philippines under decentralization using illustrations mainly in the water sector. It opens up a study of the constraints and challenges in governance and regulation that local government units (LGUs) face in narrowing down the...

This paper studies the impacts of the infrastructure project on economic development in Kazakhstan. We first overview the macroeconomic situation and the development of public-private partnerships in Kazakhstan. In the empirical part of this research, we use the "difference-in-difference" (DiD)...