Publication: Liberia's Infrastructure : A Continental Perspective
Loading...
Date
2011-03-01
ISSN
Published
2011-03-01
Author(s)
Pushak, Nataliya
Abstract
Liberia's power generating capacity and national grid were completely demolished during 14 years of civil war. Piped water access fell from 15 percent of the population in 1986 to less than 3 percent in 2008. War also left the national road network in a state of severe disrepair. Since the return of peace, the port of Monrovia has resumed normal operations under private management, and progress has been made in securing donor finance for road reconstruction. Liberia has also successfully liberalized its mobile telephone markets, with low-priced access surging to 40 percent in 2009. Liberia's starkest challenge lies in funding a more cost-effective power sector. The country's generation capacity is barely one-tenth of the benchmark level of Africa's other low-income countries. The cost of generating power is exorbitant, and the power tariff is three times the regional average. Addressing Liberia's public infrastructure needs will require sustained expenditures of between $350 million and $600 million annually, mostly to fund power and transport. In the mid-2000s, with all sources of spending taken into account, Liberia spent around $90 million a year on infrastructure. An additional $17 million was lost to inefficiencies, such as underpricing of power. Because Liberia suffers an annual funding gap of between $250 million and $500 million per year, it will need a combination of increased finance, improved efficiency, and cost-reducing innovations to reach its infrastructure targets in a reasonable time. Without these, Liberians may have to wait for up to 40 years to achieve the targets.
Link to Data Set
Citation
“Pushak, Nataliya; Foster, Vivien. 2011. Liberia's Infrastructure : A Continental Perspective. Policy Research working paper ; no. WPS 5597. © http://hdl.handle.net/10986/3362 License: CC BY 3.0 IGO.”
Other publications in this report series
Publication Regional Convergence in Brazil(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-09-11)This paper examines whether labor productivity converged across Brazil’s states (“departments”) between 2002 and 2018. The results show strong evidence of unconditional convergence in which states with lower levels of initial labor productivity experienced substantially faster labor productivity growth. The convergence rate was faster over 2002–10 compared to 2010–18 period and particularly strong in agriculture, extractives, and manufacturing. These findings of the regional convergence are robust to controlling for state and industry fixed effects, states’ initial poverty rates, human capital, tax collection per capita, and infrastructure. Given the high disparity in labor productivity across Brazil’s states, such regional convergence has the potential to raise aggregate productivity and per capita income.Publication Evaluation of Door-to-Door Tax Enforcement Strategy in Indonesia(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-09-10)This paper presents an evaluation of a tax enforcement program conducted in Indonesia where officials from the tax authority visited properties to engage directly with owners about their property tax obligations. Through these visits, auditors explained outstanding debts and payment processes, aiming to improve tax compliance and revenue collection. The paper uses an administrative data set and a new set of machine learning–based techniques to assess the program’s effectiveness. The program was responsible for increasing tax compliance on the extensive margin by 4.3 percent and on the intensive margin by 5.1 percent in the first year it was implemented. These effects are particularly strong as they persist in the following period. The findings show that the visited properties had better compliance history, lower value, smaller area, and were more likely to have some construction on them. A key finding from the analysis is that higher-value properties are less sensitive to the visits. In other words, if a data-driven tax-enforcement strategy is to be applied, then it may focus resources on enforcing taxation at the poorest part of the population in this case. This opens up the discussion of the distributional consequences of an algorithm-based enforcement strategy, which is increasingly important as machine learning techniques are used by tax authorities.Publication The Economic Impacts of the Syrian Refugee Migration on Jordan(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-09-10)The Syrian Civil War in 2011 led to a substantial influx of refugees into Jordan, with more than 660,000 Syrians arriving by 2015. More than half of these refugees were of working age. This study shows that Syrian refugees have less education than their Jordanian counterparts, and policies attempted to help them to assimilate into manufacturing. The study tests two hypotheses related to refugee assimilation. The first hypothesis examines the 2016 Jordan Compact with the European Union, which aimed to integrate Syrian refugees and improve Jordan’s export profile with simplified rules of origin for certain industries. If the Jordan Compact was effective, a relative increase in exports to the European Union, compared to other regions, would be expected. The second hypothesis suggests that the successful integration of Syrian workers into the manufacturing sector contributed to a boost in manufacturing exports to all destinations relative to other exports. The study conducts a gravity difference-in-differences analysis to evaluate these two hypotheses. The findings show little, if any, evidence supporting the first hypothesis but strong support for the second. These findings suggest that although the simplified rules of origin had limited impact on exports to the European Union, the Jordanian government effectively integrated Syrian workers into the manufacturing sector. Labor force surveys indicate that a skill mismatch impeded the integration of Syrian workers into the industries targeted by the Jordan Compact, but refugees were successfully assimilated into the manufacturing industry.Publication Export-Led Industrial Policy for Developing Countries(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-09-10)Industrial policy prioritizes growth in specific sectors. Yet there is little agreement about how to target sectors in practice, and many argue that governments cannot pick winners. This essay observes that governments can and do identify tradable sectors where public inputs accelerate growth and generate economic benefits. These strategic sectors are: (i) those that are relatively more productive, and (ii) those that are relatively less productive but require technology like the country’s existing technology and have rapidly growing markets and limited international competition. Since developing countries are productive in fewer sectors and have less technology, targeting can be more valuable for them. Export promotion agencies are institutions that have demonstrated effectiveness in coordinating public inputs to grow these sectors. Compared to protectionism, this alternative approach to ‘industrial policy’ is cheaper, less susceptible to capture by unproductive firms, and permissible under the rules of international trade agreements. Many countries’ development strategies adopt this approach.Publication Dynamic Exports and Labor Markets for Inclusive Growth in Cambodia(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-09-09)Cambodia’s rapid economic growth in the past few decades has coincided with trade liberalization and structural transformation. This growth has been extensively associated with more employment, higher wages, shared prosperity, and poverty reduction. By combining two complementary approaches, the gravity model and the Bartik model, this paper estimates: (i) the relationship between trade agreements and trade flows, and (ii) the relationship between trade exposure and various local labor market outcomes. The gravity estimates show that trade agreements between the Association of Southeast Asian Nations are positively related with trade flows, and that Cambodia’s specific gains from these increases in trade have been larger than for the average trade agreement. This has led to better results for workers in Cambodia’s local labor markets. The shift-share Bartik results suggest that increases in trade exposure in Cambodian districts between 2009 and 2019 correlate with reduced informality and an increase in hours worked, with more positive effects for female workers.