Making Sense of Africa’s Infrastructure Endowment : A Benchmarking Approach
The paper's objective is to explain factors underlying Africa's weak infrastructure endowment and to identify suitable infrastructure goals for the region based on benchmarking against international peers. The authors use a dataset coveri...
| Main Authors: | , , |
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| Format: | Policy Research Working Paper |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
2012
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://www-wds.worldbank.org/external/default/main?menuPK=64187510&pagePK=64193027&piPK=64187937&theSitePK=523679&menuPK=64187510&searchMenuPK=64187283&siteName=WDS&entityID=000158349_20090430140801 http://hdl.handle.net/10986/4115 |
| Summary: | The paper's objective is to explain
factors underlying Africa's weak infrastructure
endowment and to identify suitable infrastructure goals for
the region based on benchmarking against international
peers. The authors use a dataset covering the stocks of key
infrastructure-including information and communication
technology (ICT), power, roads, and water-across 155
developing countries over the period 1960 to 2005. The paper
also examines subregional differences within Africa. They
make use of regression techniques to control for a
comprehensive set of economic, demographic, geographic, and
historic conditioning factors, as well as adjusting for
potential endogeneities. Results show that Africa lags
behind all other regions of the developing world in its
infrastructure endowment, except in ICT. By far the largest
gaps arise in the power sector, with generating capacity and
household access to electricity at half the levels observed
in South Asia. While it is often assumed that Africa's
infrastructure deficit is largely a reflection of its
relatively low income levels, the authors find that African
countries have much more limited infrastructure than income
peers in other parts of the developing world. Countries that
face the most challenging environment, with low population
density, weak governance, and history of conflict, have the
poorest infrastructure endowments. At the outset of the data
series, Africa was doing significantly better than other
developing regions for road density, generation capacity,
and fixed-line telephones, but Africa's relative
position has deteriorated over time. The most dramatic loss
of ground has come in electrical generating capacity, which
has stagnated since 1980. |
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