The impact of infrastructure spending in Sub-Saharan Africa : a CGE modeling approach

The authors constructed a standard computable general equilibrium (CGE) model to explore the economic impact of increased spending on infrastructure in six African countries: Benin, Cameroon, Mali, Senegal, Tanzania, and Uganda. The basic elements of the model are drawn from EXTER, adjusted to accommodate infrastructure externalities. Seven sectors were considered: food crop agriculture, export agriculture, mining and oil, manufacturing, construction, private services, and public services. Four sets of simulations were conducted: baseline nonproductive investments, roads, electricity, and telecoms. For each set of simulations, five funding schemes were considered: reduced public expenditure; increased value-added taxes; increased import duties; funding from foreign aid; and increased income taxes. In general, the funding schemes had similar qualitative and quantitative effects on macro variables. For road and electricity investment, there were relatively large quantitative differences and some qualitative differences among funding schemes at the macro level. Sectoral analysis revealed further disparities among countries and investment types. The same type of investment with the same funding sources had varying effects depending on the economic structure of the sector in question. The authors find that few sectors are purely tradable or non-tradable, having instead variable degrees of openness to trade. If the current account needs to be balanced, funding investment through foreign aid produces the strongest sectoral effects because strong price and nominal exchange rate adjustments are needed to clear the current account balance. In addition, the capital/labor ratio of each sector plays an important role in determining its winners and losers.Economic Theory&Research,Debt Markets,Emerging Markets,Investment and Investment Climate,Public Sector Expenditure Policy

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead

Des hydro-électriciens face à la variabilité climatique

When making investment or management decisions in the hydroelectricity business, one must often consider the future state of water resources as a random variable. A frequent hypothesis is that of the stationarity of the process : the distribution function of past observations is representative of the distribution function of future observations. Observations of hydrologic regime changes during the twentieth century over various locations lead us to believe that we should consider such phenomena if we are to correctly assess hydrological risk, and that we should reconsider the stationarity hypothesis. Adding to the difficulty of integrating climate variability information into our models are the small samples that we must use to properly evaluate that variability. That problem created a lot of questioning in Québec during the last decade. When we study the annual inflow time series of a number of Québec''s watersheds, particularly in the northeastern part of the Québec-Labrador peninsula, we can identify alternating sequences of high and low inflows. Is the past key to the future ? Should we neglect possible shifts in the series when modelling and forecasting inflows ? Is the long term series average the best predictor for long term expected inflows ? Can we use explanatory variables to explain those changes and help with inflow forecast ? Hydro-Québec has developed and uses many models taking into account those questions. Some models use hidden Markov chains to evaluate regime changes probabilities. Others are depending on climate indices to issue forecasts. Finally, some models combine those approaches. To continue progressing, we now must add larger scale historical information to the models. Using dendrochronology data seems to be the most promising way to improve our models.Résumé : Dans l’élaboration de ses décisions de gestion ou d’investissement, l’hydro-électricien est amené à considérer l’état futur des ressources en eau comme une variable aléatoire. Pour ce faire, on a souvent adopté une approche académique consistant à supposer que la fonction de répartition des observations passées – aux fluctuations d’échantillonnage près – régissait parfaitement les réalisations futures (l’hypothèse de stationnarité). En cas de variabilité climatique, cette démarche entraîne une sous-estimation des probabilités de s’écarter des valeurs communes. Les changements de régime hydrologique observés çà et là sur la planète au XXème siècle montrent qu’il est nécessaire d’envisager de tels phénomènes pour mieux décliner le principe de précaution. Mais l’échantillon local récent étant toujours insuffisant pour apprécier exhaustivement ce type de variabilité, la difficulté est d’intégrer cette variabilité dans nos modèles tout en maîtrisant la subjectivité de l’opération. Ce problème a suscité beaucoup de questionnements et de débats au Québec depuis plus d’une dizaine d’années. En effet, si on examine les chroniques d’apports annuels de certains bassins versants québécois, en particulier pour les bassins versants du nord-est de la péninsule Québec-Labrador, on peut observer en alternance des séquences d''années consécutives de faible et de forte hydraulicité. Le passé est-il garant de l’avenir ? Doit-on négliger la possible présence de ruptures lors de la modélisation et de la prévision des apports en eau ? La moyenne de tout l’historique demeure-t-elle la meilleure prévision de l''apport des années à venir ? Existe-t-il des variables exogènes qui pourraient expliquer ces changements de régimes et qui pourraient être exploitées pour prévoir les apports à venir ? Hydro-Québec a développé et utilise plusieurs modèles proposant des réponses à ces questions. Certains envisagent les probabilités de changement de régime selon une chaîne de Markov cachée. D’autres s’appuient sur des indicateurs climatiques, voire des prévisions météorologiques saisonnières. D’autres, enfin, combinent ces deux approches. L’ajout d’une information historique plus large est aujourd’hui nécessaire pour aller plus loin. La piste la plus prometteuse dans ce sens est l’exploitation des données fournies par la dendrochronologie.Perrault Luc, Garçon Rémy, Gaudet Jocelyn. Des hydro-électriciens face à la variabilité climatique. In: Variations climatiques et hydrologie. Le climat, ses variations séculaires et ses changements pronostiqués : quel impact sur l'hydrologie (ressources en eau et évènements rares, étiages - crues). 29èmes Journées de l'Hydraulique. Congrès de la Société Hydrotechnique de France. Lyon, 27-28 mars 2007. 2007

The Impact of Infrastructure Spending in Sub-Saharan Africa: A CGE Modeling Approach

In this paper we construct a standard CGE model to explore the impact of scaling up infrastructure in six African countries. As the debate on the importance of scaling up infrastructure to stimulate growth and provide a push to African economies, some analysts raise concern on financing these infrastructures after construction and that external funding of these can create major distortion and have a negative impact on the trade balance of these countries. This study aims to provide insights into this debate. It draws from the infrastructure productivity literature to postulate positive productive externalities of new infrastructure and Fay and Yepes (2003) for operating cost associated with new infrastructure. We compare various infrastructure investments funded with different fiscal tools. These investments scenarios are compared to nonproductive investment that can be interpreted as a business as usual scenario. Our results show that foreign aid does produce Dutch disease effects but the negative impacts are strongly dependent on the type of investments performed. Moreover, growth effects contribute to attenuate the negative effects

Impact of Infrastructure Spending in Mali: A CGE Modeling Approach

In this paper we construct a standard CGE model to explore the impact of scaling up infrastructure in an African country. As the debate on the importance of scaling up infrastructure to stimulate growth and provide a push to African economies, some analyst raise concern on financing these infrastructures after construction and that external funding of these can create major distortion and have a negative impact on the trade balance of these countries. This study aims to provide so insight into this debate. It draws from the infrastructure productivity literature to postulate positive productive externalities of new infrastructure and Fay and Yepes (2003) for operating cost associated with new infrastructure. We compare various infrastructure investment funded with different fiscal tools. These investments scenarios are compared to non productive investment that can be interpreted as a business as usual scenario. Our results show that foreign aid does produce Dutch disease effects but the negative impacts are strongly dependent on the type of investments performed. Moreover, growth effects contribute to attenuate the negative effects.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishe

Les cartulaires du prieuré fontevriste de Montazais (XIIe et XVIe siècles): édition et traduction

International audienc

Les cartulaires du prieuré fontevriste de Montazais (XIIe et XVIe siècles): édition et traduction

International audienc

IMPACT OF INFRASTRUCTURE SPENDING IN SUB-SAHARAN AFRICA: A CGE MODELING APPROACH

In this paper we construct an archetype CGE model and apply it to six sub-Saharan African countries to explore the impact of scaling up infrastructure in African countries. As part of the debate on the importance of scaling up infrastructure to stimulate growth and provide a push to African economies, some analysts have raised concerns on providing massive financing for the construction of these infrastructures as the process can create major distortion in the economies and have a negative impact by creating Dutch disease symptoms (Adam and Bevan 2006). This study aims to provide some insight into this debate. It draws from the infrastructure productivity literature to postulate positive productive externalities of new infrastructure and Fay and Yepes (2003) for operating cost associated with new infrastructure. We compare various infrastructure investment funded with different fiscal tools. These investments scenarios are compared to non productive investment that can be interpreted as a business as usual scenario. Our results show that increase in infrastructure investment does produce slight Dutch disease effects but the negative impacts are strongly dependent on the type of investments performed and type of financing scheme used. Moreover, the growth effects we introduced contribute to attenuate the negative effects.Investment externalities, foreign aid, exchange rate, fiscal reforms

Impact of Infrastructure Spending in Mali: A CGE modeling approach

In this paper we construct a standard CGE model to explore the impact of scaling up infrastructure in Mali. As the debate on the importance of scaling up infrastructure to stimulate growth and provide a push to African economies, some analyst raise concern on financing these infrastructures after construction and that external funding of these can create major distortion and have a negative impact on the trade balance of these countries. This study aims to provide so insight into this debate. It draws from the infrastructure productivity literature to postulate positive productive externalities of new infrastructure and Fay and Yepes (2003) for operating cost associated with new infrastructure. We compare various infrastructure investment funded with different fiscal tools. These investments scenarios are compared to non productive investment that can be interpreted as a business as usual scenario. Our results show that foreign aid does produce Dutch disease effects but the negative impacts are strongly dependent on the type of investments performed. Moreover, growth effects contribute to attenuate the negative effects.Investment externalities, foreign aid, exchange rate, fiscal reforms