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This book reviews Latin America's experience with infrastructure reform over the last fifteen years. It argues that the region's infrastructure has suffered from public retrenchment and unrealistic expectations about private involvement. Poor infrastructure now hampers productivity, growth, and poverty reduction. Addressing this requires more and better spending, and acceptance that governments remain central to infrastructure provision and supervision, although the private sector still has an important role to play.

Infrastructure plays a key role in fostering growth and productivity and has been linked to improved earnings, health, and education levels for the poor. Yet Latin America and the Caribbean are currently faced with a dangerous combination of relatively low public and private infrastructure investment. Those investment levels must increase, and it can be done. If Latin American and Caribbean governments are to increase infrastructure investment in politically feasible ways, it is critical that they learn from experience and have an accurate idea of future impacts. This book contributes to this aim by producing what is arguably the most comprehensive privatization impact analysis in the region to date, drawing on an extremely comprehensive dataset.

Workers' remittances have become a major source of financing for developing countries and are especially important in Latin America and the Caribbean, which is at the top of the ranking of remittance receiving regions in the world. While there has been a recent surge in analytical work on the topic, this book is motivated by the large heterogeneity in migration and remittance patterns across countries and regions, and by the fact that existing evidence for Latin America and the Caribbean is restricted to only a few countries, such as Mexico and El Salvador. Because the nature of the phenomenon varies across countries, its development impact and policy implications are also likely to differ in ways that are still largely unknown. This book helps fill the gap by exploring, in the specific context of Latin America and Caribbean countries, some of the main questions faced by policymakers when trying to respond to increasing remittances flows. The book relies on cross-country panel data and household surveys for 11 Latin American countries to explore the development impact of remittance flows along several dimensions: growth, poverty, inequality, schooling, health, labor supply, financial development, and real exchange rates.

The report starts with an overview and introduces the main findings. It addresses major constraints, instruments, and outcomes important to unleash the potential of infrastructure investments and policy fine-tuning. Chapter one discusses the infrastructure and growth nexus, given the country's macroeconomic scenario. It examines the long-term sustainability, particularly considering the Mahinda Chintana's high infrastructure investment targets, and how the country can achieve its high economic growth targets, given its historical and current investment levels. Chapter two argues that the two principal drivers of sustained high economic growth and productive employment are: (a) international competitiveness that results in export-led growth; and (b) urbanization that facilitates productive economic activity. Chapter three reviews key infrastructure sectors to identify the regulatory issues that need to be addressed and estimate the needed investment. Redressing infrastructure constraints, however, cannot be piecemeal and product specific. Instead, a sector-wide approach is needed. In light of the large investment requirement and high public debt and deficit, chapter four discusses the potential of public-private partnership in infrastructure delivery and supportive regulatory reform. Finally, chapter five concludes the analysis, summarizing major highlights.

This paper develops a growth model with specialized goods where inefficient and corrupt bureaucracies interact with the provision of public investment services in affecting the productivity of private capital, specialization, and growth. The model provides potential explanations for the contradictory empirical results on the effects of public investment found in the literature as well as for the role of the quality of public infrastructure investment in creating a gap between rich and poor countries. From a policy perspective, the paper suggests that the link between public investment and growth depends critically on the quality and efficiency of public capital.

This paper reviews some broad principles of fiscal coverage, building on cross-country experience. It discusses the level of coverage that would be appropriate to conduct good quality fiscal analysis, while striking the right balance between the costs and the benefits of expanding the coverage. In this context, the paper examines the current status of statistical fiscal coverage in the countries of the Middle East and Central Asia (MECA), and proposes operational approaches to improving it.

This study offers a computable general equilibrium analysis of the $550 billion devoted to new infrastructure investment (new and remodeled physical infrastructure for transportation, information and public services) in the United States under the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, a federal law signed by President Joseph Biden in November 2021. The simulations are based on the state-level distribution of funds and distinguish between the construction phase (short run) and the operational phase (long run). Gross domestic product (GDP) and labor demand react to the government spending stimulus after the first year by growing 0.24% and 0.44%, respectively. The gains derived from this investment plan are higher in the long term once investments increase the country’s capital stock; GDP increases by 1.39% and wages by 3.94%. This paper analyzes the efficiency of the current distribution of funds across sectors, and finds that the current distribution benefits the United States economy more. Even though a slightly higher GDP impact could have been reached (1.42%) if all the funds were devoted to transport services, the price increases would result in lower real wage increases.

Customers in the US and Canada please order from Stanford University Press at (800) 621-2736 or visit their website at www.sup.org. Over the 1980s and 1990s, most Latin American countries witnessed a retrenchment of the public sector from infrastructure provision and an opening up of infrastructure activities to the private sector. This book analyzes the consequences of these policy changes from two perspectives. First, it reviews in a comparative framework the major trends in infrastructure provision in Latin America over the last two decades. Second, it evaluates the implication of these trends for economic growth and public deficits in the region. The book shows that in most countries private participation did not fully offset the public sector retrenchment. The result was a slowdown in infrastructure accumulation, which entailed a significant growth cost and weakened the intended impact of the infrastructure spending cuts on public sector insolvency. “This fascinating book highlights a neglected cost of two decades of fiscal austerity in Latin America. The authors' careful analysis reveals that the decline in public investment in infrastructure may have been expensive not only for growth, but for long-term fiscal solvency as well. Deserves to be read by every IMF economist (and many others besides).” Dani Rodrik, Harvard University

Seventy-five percent of the world's poor live in rural areas and most are involved in agriculture. In the 21st century, agriculture remains fundamental to economic growth, poverty alleviation, and environmental sustainability. The World Bank's Agriculture and rural development publication series presents recent analyses of issues that affect the role of agriculture, including livestock, fisheries, and forestry, as a source of economic development, rural livelihoods, and environmental services. The series is intended for practical application, and hope that it will serve to inform public discussion, policy formulation, and development planning. Increased global demand for land because of higher and more volatile food prices, urbanization, and use of land for environmental services implies an increased need for well-designed land policies at the country level to ensure security of long-held rights, to facilitate land access, and to deal with externalities. Establishing the infrastructure necessary to proactively deal with these challenges can require large amounts of resources. Yet with land tenure deeply rooted in any country's history, a wide continuum of land rights, and vast differences in the level of socioeconomic development, the benefits to be expected and the challenges faced will vary across and even within countries, implying a need to adapt the nature and sequencing of reforms to country circumstances. Also, as reforms will take time to bear fruit and may be opposed by vested interests, there is a need to identify challenges and to reach consensus on how to address them in a way that allows objective monitoring of progress over time. Without this being done, the chances of making quick progress in addressing key land policy challenges are likely to be much reduced. The Land Governance Assessment Framework (LGAF) is intended as a first step to help countries deal with these issues. It is a diagnostic tool that is to be implemented at the local level in a collaborative fashion, that addresses the need for guidance to diagnose and benchmark land governance, and that can help countries prioritize reforms and monitor progress over time.

This study aims to investigate three important issues whether or not public infrastructure contributes to production in the private sector, whether or not political economy factors such as political situation affect the allocation of public infrastructure investment, and what the government’s investment behavior is. We estimate simultaneous equations by using a panel data set of 46 prefectures in Japan for five-time periods from 1975 to 1990. We conclude the following: (1) public capital contributes to productivity, (2) the investment behavior of both governments is efficiency-oriented for private productivity and for the capital stock level, (3) a substitute of public capital investment between the national and prefectural governments can be found, (4) there is a clear political factor in the national government’s public investment function, and (5) the availability of national government grants for the construction of infrastructure boosts investment among prefectural governments.