The World Bank, in its assessment of Africa’s Infrastructure (2010) noted that Africa’s infrastructure network lagged other regions of the world and that it exhibited key missing regional links. As a result, infrastructure services, where available, were twice as expensive as elsewhere, reflecting both diseconomies of scale and a lack of competition. 

Much attention has been devoted to the costs of needed infrastructure investments; indeed even the estimates of the Commission for Africa (2005) are now considered woefully small by the World Bank compared to requirements. At the same time, the World Bank estimates that half of the continent’s recent (pre-crisis) growth was due to infrastructure improvements. Bottlenecks in road transport, overly costly ICT services, difficulty in managing regional public goods like waterways, lack of scale in the power sector and regulatory limits to power sharing all lead to weak performance on any number of measures, such as the Logistics Perception Index or Costs of Doing Business. And they limit economic growth and welfare gains. 

 

With this mind, the Growth Dialogue, a successor network to the Growth Commission (www.growthcommission.org), and the African Center for Economic Transformation (www.acetforafrica.org) joined forces to host a high-level policy forum to discuss ways in which institutional, planning and regulatory constraints to more effective infrastructure investment can be overcome for the benefit of the continent. How is this different from any number of seminars and conferences on this topic? It is unique because it aims to sponsor both peer to peer learning among senior policymakers and because it is profoundly practical in its objectives. Similar to many conversations of the Growth Commission, it saught to bring together policymakers from different countries with the singular purpose of identifying the binding constraints to economic growth. If, in the course of these conversations, new ideas emerge that can be translated into practical recommendations, it will be the task of ACET and the Growth Dialogue to broadcast these views in order to promote policy change. 

 

The Policy Forum  was attended by influential thinkers and policymakers from Africa and other continents and was focused on: 

 - the role of national-level infrastructure planning, 

 - the role of supranational infrastructure projects to spur economic growth, and on 

 - the institutional and regulatory regional constraints that experts have identified in both national and regional contexts. 

 

The event summary is available here.