Publication: Prioritizing Infrastructure Investments: A Comparative Review of Applications in Chile
Date
2018-10
ISSN
Published
2018-10
Author(s)
Marcelo, Darwin
House, Schuyler
Raina, Aditi
Abstract
Governments worldwide face the difficult
challenge of deciding which infrastructure projects to
prioritize and select for implementation, given the limits
of available funding and the need to attain their
developmental goals. The key objective of this report is to
conduct a comparative exercise between the World Bank's
Infrastructure Prioritization Framework, a multicriteria
analysis–based methodology to project prioritization, and a
more complex cost-benefit analysis–based approach. The
report focuses on Chile, which has a well-institutionalized
evaluation process that uses cost-benefit analysis to assess
projects on their quality and ability to generate value for
money. The analysis compares the results of the
Infrastructure Prioritization Framework alongside
Chile's current cost-benefit analysis–based and
multicriteria analysis approaches to the same subsets of
projects in the road transport and water reservoir
subsectors, respectively. The results show that the
Infrastructure Prioritization Framework has application
beyond its original proposition and can complement a
traditional cost-benefit analysis by directly considering
social and environmental policy goals that are otherwise
difficult to quantify in a cost-benefit analysis. The
analysis also finds that in Chile there is a discrepancy
between the stated goals and objectives of the appraisal
system and the actual implementation. In the case of
transport sector projects, there is an evident deviation
between cost-benefit analysis–based selection policy and
actual decisions made for project implementation. In the
case of water catchment selection, there is a bias toward
projects with higher financial-economic performance as
compared to social-environmental performance, despite policy
intentions to afford consideration to environmental and
social development goals.
Citation
“Marcelo, Darwin; House, Schuyler; Raina, Aditi. 2018. Prioritizing Infrastructure Investments; Prioritizing Infrastructure Investments: A Comparative Review of Applications in Chile : A Comparative Review of Applications in Chile. Policy Research Working Paper;No. 8602. © World Bank, Washington, DC. http://openknowledge.worldbank.org/handle/10986/30511 License: CC BY 3.0 IGO.”
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