INFRALATAM Website with a Fresh Look
INFRALATAM is the product of an institutional partnership between CAF, the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) and the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), whose purpose is to aid in the search for accurate information on public investment in economic infrastructure in the region.
The three organizations have redesigned INFRALATAM’s website and updated data on public investment in economic infrastructure for 21 Latin American and Caribbean countries for the period 2008–2019.
The goal of the new website design is to give users a tool to make graphical comparisons year-on-year between countries and/or industries, download information from the database, and refer to research material that has been developed in the area of economic infrastructure.
Economic infrastructure is paramount to countries’ development, and estimates are very useful in measuring their impact on economic growth and establishing the level of investment needed for countries’ development goals.
Newly published data show that public investment in economic infrastructure for the 21 countries analyzed has been around 2% of GDP for the past 5 years. The transport sector accounts for approximately 60% of this total.
The figure below sets out the detail of public investment in average infrastructure by country between 2015 and 2019. As seen in the graph, the countries with the largest public investment in relation to their GDP have been Bolivia and Belize, with rates between 2.5 and 3.5 times above the regional average.
The same trend can be observed in the following “heat map” for the year 2019. It displays more intensely the countries with the largest public investment in economic infrastructure in relation to their GDP. Following Bolivia and Belize, we find Nicaragua and Panama, at 3.9% and 2.6%, respectively.
All this information, plus complete data on public investment in economic infrastructure disaggregated by country, sector, subsector and year (2008–2019) can be accessed on the website http://infralatam.info.