Effects of Improving Infrastructure Quality on Business Costs : Evidence from Firm-Level Data

Iimi, Atsushi

World Bank, Washington, DC

关键词: ACCESS TO SERVICES;    ASSET REPLACEMENT;    BASIC INFRASTRUCTURE;    BUSINESS ENVIRONMENT;    CENTRAL ASIAN;   

DOI  :  10.1596/1813-9450-4581
RP-ID  :  WPS4581

学科分类：社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）

来源: World Bank Open Knowledge Repository

【 摘 要 】

Economic development is affected byinfrastructure services in both volume and quality terms.However, the quality of infrastructure is relativelydifficult to measure and assess. The current paper, usingfirm-level data collected by a business environmentassessment survey in 26 countries in Europe and CentralAsia, estimates the marginal impacts on firm costs ofinfrastructure quality. The results suggest that thereliability or continuity of services is important forbusiness performance. Firm costs significantly increase whenelectricity outages occur more frequently and the averageoutage duration becomes longer. Similarly, increased hoursof water supply suspensions also reduce firms'competitiveness. In these countries, it is found that thetotal benefit for the economy from eliminating the existingelectricity outages ranges from 0.5 to 6 percent of grossdomestic product. If all water suspensions are removed, theeconomy could receive a gain of about 0.5 to 2 percent ofgross domestic product. By contrast, the quality oftelecommunications services seems to have no significant impact.