Essays on the Effects of Growth, Public Expenditures and Infrastructure Investments in Developing Countries
by Miguel Almanzar
Date of Examination:2017-07-07
Date of issue:2017-07-14
Advisor:Prof. Dr. Matin Qaim
Referee:Dr. Maximo Torero
Referee:Prof. Dr. Bernhard Brümmer
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Abstract
English
The general objective of this dissertation is to understand the relationship between economic growth, government expenditure in public services and infrastructure on different sectors of the population. Through three essays this dissertation pursues the objective by explicitly highlighting the importance of data, theory and methodology. This approach interprets findings in a literature that has few existing examples that demonstrate similar rigorous evidence on the effects of growth and infrastructure. This dissertation attempts to contribute to the literature by providing a sound framework to analyze the distributional effect of growth and government expenditures. The first essay tackles the questions of how growth and government expenditures affect different socio-economic groups in Rwanda and Tanzania. This essay provides a distributional framework through which we can better understand the effects of government expenditure and group by explicitly modeling the household sector and the government sector. The second essay assess the effects of improvement in rural road quality. Using the rehabilitation of the Northern Transnational Highway (NTH) we asses, whether the improvement in this rural road achieved its goal of “connecting northern El Salvador with the rest of the country, helping to create opportunities for the region’s residents through increased access to markets.” The third essay quantifies the benefits of water, sanitation and hygiene interventions of the agreement. These interventions followed a community demand driven model that allowed us to design a rigorous impact evaluation that provides reliable estimates that are not plagued by placement bias and omitted variable bias that characterizes much of the evidence in the literature.
Keywords: inequality; growth; Rwanda; Tanzania; fiscal policy; water; sanitation; rural road; impact evaluation