In academic or policy circles, few experts would dispute the view that infrastructure development fosters growth. However, there is no consensus on the magnitude of the effect or the factors that shape it. Triggered by Aschauer (1989), there is a massive empirical literature that focuses on the impact of infrastructure on the level and growth rate of aggregate output or productivity. One strand of this literature examines the long-term growth impact of infrastructure-primarily using a reduced-form growth regression framework that links long-term growth to indicators of infrastructure, public capital, or public investment.8 Growth regressions have used monetary measures of public capital and/or investment, as well as physical indicators of infrastructure stocks. Using physical indicators renders invariably significant growth effects. Some studies have focused on single-sector analysis (typically, indicators of telecommunications penetration or density); others have used synthetic indicators that capture stocks of physical infrastructure in different sectors-say, telecommunications, electric power, and transport.
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8 The growth regression approach often includes standard control variables from the empirical growth literature (see Calderon and Servén 2004, 2010).