ECA INFRASTRUCTURE INDICATORS DATABASE
Unintentional implicit subsidies (hidden costs) to public utilities can be considered an illegitimate claim on public resources. A paper has been prepared “Measuring Financial Performance in Infrastructure” (June 2006) that examines the role and sources of hidden costs in the energy and water sectors in the Europe and Central Asia Region (ECA). It reviews available data and introduces a model—the Hidden Costs Calculator—developed through collaboration between the World Bank Group and the International Monetary Fund—that can be used to quantify the burden on governments of infrastructure policy and implementation decisions. This simple-to-apply model provides insight into three key components of hidden costs that affect infrastructure—poor bill collection rates; excessive losses due to inefficient operations or theft from the networks; tariffs set below cost-recovery rates. The major advantage of this model is that, using existing data, it can provide a single measure for hidden costs that can be easily calculated, tracked, and reported; therefore it can monitor and benchmark trends across sectors and countries without extensive or costly data collection. The model compares the difference between actual revenues and revenues that could be anticipated in a well-functioning system operating with cost-covering tariffs, bills paid, and losses normative for networks of a certain age and design. The underlying premise is that quantifying the order of magnitude of each component of hidden costs has potential for strengthening infrastructure policy dialogue and influencing decision makers who allocate scarce budgetary resources. Hidden cost calculations and the underlying supporting data are presented in this website.
In the case of transport, applying the model was challenging because it is fundamentally different from the power, water, and natural gas sectors. In addition, the transport lacks consistent data sources over time, and data sets among countries in the Region lack sufficient commonalty for meaningful comparison. Nevertheless this report includes some transport discussion including state budget support, working ratio, and staffing data for rail and yearly average expenditures in roads. The discussion demonstrates the difficulty in applying the model to the sector but seeks appropriate financial performance indicators. The data and indicators used are presented through this website. (Click to go to the database)
DATA AT A GLANCE DATABASE
This database will give you summarized Macro Economic data on ECA countries. (Click to go to the database)
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