Prioritizing Infrastructure Investment : A Framework for Government Decision Making

Marcelo, Darwin ; Mandri-Perrott, Cledan ; House, Schuyler ; Schwartz, Jordan

World Bank, Washington, DC

关键词: SANITATION;    COMMUNITIES;    TRANSPORT SECTOR;    POLITICS;    PRINCIPAL;   

DOI  :  10.1596/1813-9450-7674
RP-ID  :  WPS7674

学科分类：社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）

来源: World Bank Open Knowledge Repository

【 摘 要 】

Governments must decide how to allocatelimited resources for infrastructure development,particularly since financing gaps have been projected forthe coming decades. Social cost-benefit analysis providessound project appraisal and, when systematically applied, abasis for prioritization. In some instances, however,capacity and resource limitations make extensive economicanalyses across all projects unfeasible in the immediateterm. This paper responds to a need for expanding theavailable set of tools for project selection by proposing analternative prioritization approach that is systematic andfeasible within the current resource means of government.The Infrastructure Prioritization Framework is amulti-criteria decision support tool that considers projectoutcomes along two dimensions, social-environmental andfinancial-economic. When large sets of small- tomedium-sized projects are proposed, resources are limited,and basic project appraisal data (but not full socialcost-benefit analysis) are available, the InfrastructurePrioritization Framework can inform project selection bycombining selection criteria into social-environmental andfinancial-economic indexes. These indexes are used to plotprojects on a Cartesian plane, and the sector budget isimposed to create a project map for comparison along eachdimension. The Infrastructure Prioritization Framework isstructured to accommodate multiple policy objectives, attendto social and environmental factors, provide an intuitiveplatform for displaying results, and take advantage ofavailable data while promoting capacity building and datacollection for more sophisticated appraisal methods andselection frameworks. Decision criteria, weighting, andsensitivity analysis should be decided and made transparentin advance of selection, and analysis should be madepublicly available and open to third-party review.