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Infrastructure is critical to economic development. When infrastructure companies are owned and operated by the government, however, they create significant sources of fiscal risk. These fiscal risks can be sizable, but they are often preventable with proper planning, risk assessment, and strict rules and procedures for corporate and fiscal governance. This paper examines fiscal risk stemming from state-owned enterprises (SOEs) in the infrastructure sector in a sample of 135 firms in 19 countries from an original database of SOE financials for 2009-18. The paper develops a typology of fiscal risks and their determinants, builds new measures of fiscal injections to SOEs, and documents them using the novel database. The results show that governments support SOEs through a remarkably wide range of fiscal instruments. The fiscal cost of supporting infrastructure SOEs is usually below 1 percent of gross domestic product. Support is more prevalent and frequent than previously thought. The findings show that fiscal risk stems not only from "tail risk," but also from the everyday operation of infrastructure SOEs. The paper calculates the Altman Z" score (a measure of default risk) and shows that it can be used to forecast the need for fiscal injections in SOEs.

Economic development.

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Because trucks in Bangladesh and India are not allowed to operate across the border, cargo is transloaded at the border, and Indian trucks traveling between northeast India and the rest of India must go around Bangladesh through the Siliguri Corridor, which significantly increases transport and trade costs. This lack of integration means that it is more costly for Bangladesh and India to trade with each other than for either of them to trade with Europe. As a result, bilateral trade represents only about 10 percent of Bangladesh's trade and a mere 1 percent of India's trade. Connecting to Thrive: Challenges and Opportunities of Transport Integration in Eastern South Asia presents a collection of innovative technical analyses that show what is needed to achieve seamless connectivity in the region. The report explores the extent to which the Bangladesh-Bhutan-India-Nepal Motor Vehicles Agreement (MVA) supports the cross-border operation of road transport services and identifies the gaps in the agreement that need to be addressed to improve its effectiveness. It assesses the potential shift of freight traffic to new routes and modes in eastern India and Bangladesh once the MVA is implemented and the potential impact of the MVA on wages, employment, and income in Bangladesh and India. It explores how the local impacts of a regional corridor could be enhanced in rural areas by improving access to markets along the corridors and how women's participation in export-oriented agriculture value chains could be improved to allow women to take advantage of improved regional connectivity. Connecting to Thrive will be of interest to policy makers, private sector practitioners, and academics with an interest in regional connectivity in eastern South Asia.

Regional Integration --- Route Choice --- Rural Markets --- Rural Roads --- Transloading --- Transport Mode Choice --- Women Empowerment

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Public-private partnerships (PPPs) in infrastructure provision have expanded around the world since the early 1990s. Well-structured PPPs can unleash efficiency gains, but PPPs create liabilities for governments, including contingent ones. This paper assesses the fiscal risks from contingent liabilities from early termination of PPPs in a sample of developing countries. It analyzes the drivers of early termination and identifies systematic contractual, institutional, and macroeconomic factors that can help predict the probability that a PPP project will be terminated early, using a flexible parametric hazard regression. Using the probability distributions from the regression analysis, it simulates scenarios of fiscal risks for governments from early termination of PPPs in the electricity and transport sectors, adopting a value-at-risk approach. The findings indicate that the rate of early terminations decreases with direct government support, greater constraints on executive power, and the award of the PPP by subnational governments; it increases with project size and macro-financial shocks. The simulations show that fiscal risks from infrastructure PPP portfolios are not negligible in some countries, reaching as high as 2.8 percent of GDP. A severe macro-financial shock substantially increases the estimates, with the value at risk the year after the shock 11-20 times larger.

Financial risk.

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Since the early 1990s, public-private partnerships (PPPs) in infrastructure provision have been expanding around the world and in South Asia. Well-structured PPPs can unleash efficiency gains in the provision of infrastructure. But PPPs create liabilities for governments, including contingent liabilities. Providing infrastructure through PPPs is preferred to public provision if the efficiency gains offset the higher cost of private financing and the unexpected public liabilities that PPPs may create. This paper attempts to assess the fiscal risks from contingent liabilities assumed by South Asian governments owing to their current stock of PPPs in infrastructure. First, it analyzes the drivers of PPP distress. Second, it simulates scenarios of fiscal risks for South Asian governments from risky PPPs. Third, it studies specific PPP contract designs and their relationship with early termination in South Asia to draw lessons for future PPP contract structuring.

Infrastructure (Economics)

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Would improvements in port performance increase trade in countries on the Indian and Western Pacific Oceans? Previous studies attempted to answer this question using ad hoc measures of port efficiency that do not control for the actual use of port assets or measures that can be very noisy. To avoid these problems, this paper builds a measure of economic efficiency based on the use of port inputs to deliver port output. Using data envelop analysis, it ranks countries on the Indian and Western Pacific Oceans in terms of their port efficiency, and assesses the effect of increased efficiency. It finds that becoming as efficient as the country with the most efficient port sector would reduce their average maritime transport costs by up to 14 percent and increase their exports by up to 2.2 percent.

Data Envelopment Analysis --- Port Efficiency --- Trade --- Transport Costs