Publication: Infrastructure and Economic Growth in Egypt
Date
2010-01
ISSN
Published
2010-01
Author(s)
Loayza, Norman V.
Odawara, Rei
Abstract
In the past half a century, Egypt has
experienced remarkable progress in the provision of
infrastructure in all areas, including transportation,
telecommunication, power generation, and water and
sanitation. Judging from an international perspective, Egypt
has achieved an infrastructure status that closely
corresponds to what could be expected given its national
income level. The present infrastructure status is the
result of decades of purposeful investment. In the past 15
years, however, a worrisome trend has emerged:
Infrastructure investment has suffered a substantial
decline, which may be at odds with the country s goals of
raising economic growth. Improving infrastructure in Egypt
would require a combination of larger infrastructure
expenditures and more efficient investment. The analysis
provided in this paper suggests that an increase in
infrastructure expenditures from 5 to 6 percent of gross
domestic product would raise the annual per capita growth
rate of gross domestic product by about 0.5 percentage
points in a decade s time and 1 percentage point by the
third decade. If the increase in infrastructure investment
did not imply a heavier government burden (for instance, by
cutting down on inefficient expenditures), the corresponding
increase in growth of per capita gross domestic product
would be substantially larger, in fact twice as large by the
end of the first decade. This highlights the importance of
considering renewed infrastructure investment in the larger
context of public sector reform.
Link to Data Set
Citation
“Loayza, Norman V.; Odawara, Rei. 2010. Infrastructure and Economic Growth in Egypt. Policy Research Working Paper;No. 5177. © World Bank, Washington, DC. http://hdl.handle.net/10986/19941 License: CC BY 3.0 IGO.”
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