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On the Capacity to Absorb Public Investment: How Much is Too Much?
While expanding public investment can help filling infrastructure bottlenecks, scaling up too much and too fast often leads to inefficient outcomes. This paper rationalizes this outcome looking at the association between cost inflation and public investment in a large sample of road construction projects in developing countries. Consistent with the presence of absorptive capacity constraints, our results show a non-linear U-shaped relationship between public investment and project costs. Unit costs increase once public investment is close to 10% of GDP. This threshold is lower (about 7% of GDP) in countries with low investment efficiency and, in general, the effect of investment scaling up on costs is especially strong during investment booms.
Debt, Investment, and Growth in Developing Countries with Segmented Labor Markets
We introduce a new suite of macroeconomic models that extend and complement the Debt, Investment, and Growth (DIG) model widely used at the IMF since 2012. The new DIG-Labor models feature segmented labor markets, efficiency wages and open unemployment, and an informal non-agricultural sector. These features allow for a deeper examination of macroeconomic and fiscal policy programs and their impact on labor market outcomes, inequality, and poverty. The paper illustrates the model's properties by analyzing the growth, debt, and distributional consequences of big-push public investment programs with different mixes of investment in human capital and infrastructure. We show that investment in h...
Losing to Blackouts: Evidence from Firm Level Data
Many developing economies are often hit by electricity crises either because of supply constraints or lacking in broader energy market reforms. This study uses manufacturing firm census data from Ethiopia to identify productivity losses attributable to power disruptions. Our estimates show that these disruptions, on average, result in productivity losses of about 4–10 percent. We found nonlinear productivity losses at different quantiles along the productivity distribution. Firms at higher quantiles faced higher losses compared to firms around the median. We observed patterns of systematic shutdowns as firms attempt to minimize losses.
Well Spent
Drawing on the Fund’s analytical and capacity development work, including Public Investment Management Assessments (PIMAs) carried out in more than 60 countries, the new book Well Spent: How Strong Infrastructure Governance Can End Waste in Public Investment will address how countries can attain quality infrastructure outcomes through better infrastructure governance—an issue becoming increasingly important in the context of the Great Lockdown and its economic consequences. It covers critical issues such as infrastructure investment and Sustainable Development Goals, controlling corruption, managing fiscal risks, integrating planning and budgeting, and identifying best practices in project appraisal and selection. It also covers emerging areas in infrastructure governance, such as maintaining and managing public infrastructure assets and building resilience against climate change.
Public Investment in Bolivia: Prospects and Implications
Bolivia’s “Patriotic Agenda 2025” sets targets for social and economic development propelled by state-led industrialization under a five-year development plan (2016–2020). Large-scale public investment has aimed to fill infrastructure gaps and raise productivity to ensure sustained medium-term growth. Pursuit of these goals in a period of lower hydrocarbon revenues has, however, contributed to widening fiscal and external current account deficits. The paper uses a structural model to outline different scenarios for the level of public investment in the face of declining hydrocarbon revenues. It finds that if public investment is sustained at current levels as a share of GDP while hydrocarbon revenues continue to decline, the sustainability of the public debt could be called into question.
Mining Revenues and Inclusive Development in Guinea
What are the potential benefits of increasing the taxation of a foreign extractive sector? This paper applies this question to the case of Guinea by using a multi-sector macro-inequality model with heterogeneous agents. We quantify the long-run equilibrium impact of additional taxation when the proceeds are invested in human capital, inclusive infrastructure, and social transfers. Our analysis focuses on the response of GDP, labor formalization, poverty rates, Gini coefficients, rural/urban inequality and sectoral reallocation. The three forms of investment are complementary. Infrastructure investments favor formal production in the urban area while growth and government transfers boost the demand for food. These effects help support the rate of return to education, protecting job formalization through higher wages and prices of informal goods, as the education policy boosts labor supply in rural and urban areas.
2024 Staff Guidance Note On The IMF’s Engagement With Small Developing States
This guidance note provides operational guidance on the Fund’s engagement with small developing states (SDS). It highlights the unique economic characteristics and constraints facing SDS, notably in a more shock-prone world. Building on advice that applies to the full membership, the note explains how the characteristics of SDS shape Fund surveillance, financial support and program design, capacity development (CD), and collaboration with other institutions and donors. The note updates the previous version that was published in December 2017.
Advances of Science and Technology
This book constitutes the refereed post-conference proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Advancement of Science and Technology, ICAST 2018, which took place in Bahir Dar, Ethiopia, in October 2018. The 47 revised full papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 71 submissions. The papers present economic and technologic developments in modern societies in five tracks: agro-processing industries for sustainable development, water resources development for the shared vision in blue Nile basin, IT and computer technology innovation, recent advances in electrical and computer engineering, progresses in product design and system optimization.
Investing in Public Infrastructure
Why do governments in developing economies invest in roads and not enough in schools? In the presence of distortionary taxation and debt aversion, the different pace at which roads and schools contribute to economic growth turns out to be central to this decision. Specifically, while costs are front-loaded for both types of investment, the growth benefits of schools accrue with a delay. To put things in perspective, with a “big push,” even assuming a large (15 percent) return differential in favor of schools, the government would still limit the fraction of the investment scale-up going to schools to about a half. Besides debt aversion, political myopia also turns out to be a crucial determinant of public investment composition. A “big push,” by accelerating growth outcomes, mitigates myopia—but at the expense of greater risks to fiscal and debt sustainability. Tied concessional financing and grants can potentially mitigate the adverse effects of both debt aversion and political myopia.
Operational Guidance Note for IMF Engagement on Social Spending Issues
This note provides general guidance on the operationalization of the strategy for IMF engagement on social spending. Social spending plays a critical role as a key lever for promoting inclusive growth, addressing inequality, protecting vulnerable groups during structural change and adjustment, smoothing consumption over the lifecycle, and stabilizing demand during economic shocks. Social spending policies have also been playing an important role in tackling the structural challenges associated with demographic shifts, gender inequality, technological advances, and climate change. This note builds on a series of notes on IMF engagement on specific social spending issues since the publication of the 2019 strategy paper and provides operational guidance on when and how to engage on social spending issues, in the context of surveillance, IMF-supported programs, and capacity development.
