Rising Incomes and Inequality of Access to Infrastructure among Latin American Households
This paper documents access to services and ownership of infrastructure-related durables in the water, energy, telecom, and transport areas, based on harmonized household survey data covering 1.6 million households in 14 Latin American countries du...
| Main Authors: | , |
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| Format: | Working Paper |
| Language: | English en_US |
| Published: |
World Bank, Washington, DC
2017
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/716021488294464950/Rising-incomes-and-inequality-of-access-to-infrastructure-among-Latin-American-households http://hdl.handle.net/10986/26185 |
| Summary: | This paper documents access to services
and ownership of infrastructure-related durables in the
water, energy, telecom, and transport areas, based on
harmonized household survey data covering 1.6 million
households in 14 Latin American countries during 1992 to
2012. The paper provides a systematic disaggregation of
access and ownership rates at different levels of income and
over time, and econometrically derives the country
infrastructure premium, a measure of how much a household
benefits from simply being located in a given country. The
results show extensive inequality of access, within
countries across the income distribution, but also across
countries for households at similar levels of income. For
water and electricity, for example, up to two-thirds of the
variability in individual percentile access to
infrastructure services and consumption of related assets
can be explained by country residence only. In addition, few
country fundamentals appear to be significant in explaining
this variability, pointing to policy differences as an
important determinant. The paper derives the income
elasticity of infrastructure access for the full set of
indicators, and uses these to estimate the time that would
be needed to close the remaining gap for households at
different levels of the income distribution under a
"business as usual" hypothesis. Under that
scenario, universal access appears to be decades away for
many countries in the region. The last part discusses the
policy challenges, arguing that in a context in which public
budgets face strong constraints and significant increases in
private investment are unlikely to be forthcoming, a large
part of the solution lies in refocused investment
strategies, better demand management, and improved public
spending efficiency. |
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