# Introduction

The spending on public infrastructure (SPI) exercise is a methodological tool to support the collection and preparation of standardized, comprehensive information—comparable across countries—on public spending on infrastructure services. Particular attention is paid to the level, composition, and planning and releasing mechanisms.

Originally, the SPI exercise was developed to support the Africa Infrastructure Country Diagnostic (AICD) study<sup>1</sup> in recognition of the fact that the infrastructure data in the fiscal accounts as collected by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) were scattered and incomplete. While Africa‘s infrastructure needs are widely debated, very little was known about the existing levels and composition of public expenditure on infrastructure subsectors. Such information is important in order to structure financing options to close any funding gap. Infrastructure outlays—if at all—are reported in an aggregate manner without the economic breakdown that would delineate their nature: that is, fixed capital, operations and maintenance, interest, subsidies, the compensation of employees, and so on. In addition, such outlays are not reported by function, which would allow costs to be attributed to specific infrastructure subsectors, such as irrigation, water resource management, electricity, transport, and so on.

Between 2000 and 2005, the IMF Government Financial Statistics,<sup>2</sup> under the general government section, reported infrastructure spending data for only Uganda out of the 42 Sub-Saharan African countries. These data indicated an implausibly low spending level of 0.2 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) in 2001. Since government statistics reported by the IMF focus primarily on central government accounts, they provide incomplete coverage of infrastructure expenditure, much of which is undertaken by subnational and parastatal entities. Delivery of infrastructure services relies heavily on public (or para-public) agencies outside the purview of the central government. A significant share—if not the majority—of public expenditure in infrastructure is channeled through nonfinancial public enterprises, local governments, and (other) off-budget vehicles (for example, special funds). Off-budget vehicles play an increasingly large role in mobilizing and protecting the infrastructure financing of several sectors, including roads (and rural infrastructure in general), even when part of their resources continue to be come via budget transfers.

At a time when the international community is committed to substantively increasing official development assistance (ODA) to Africa—and to infrastructure sectors in particular—it is of utmost 1 The AICD study is being undertaken in coordination with the African Development Bank (AfDB), under the guidance of the New Partnership for Africa‘s Development (NEPAD), and is being funded by contributions from a number of donors and multidonor trust funds. In its first stage, the SPI exercise supported the generation of fiscal cost baselines and basic fiscal cross-country comparisons for 24 African countries: Benin, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Cape Verde, Chad, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Côte d‘Ivoire, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Lesotho, Madagascar, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, Niger, Nigeria, Rwanda, Senegal, South Africa, Sudan, Uganda, Tanzania, and Zambia. The second stage focuses on the following countries: Mali, Mauritania, Angola, Guinea, Botswana, Swaziland, Zimbabwe, Central African Republic, the Republic of Congo, Gabon, Eritrea, Equatorial Guinea, Togo, Gambia, Liberia, and Sierra Leone.

> 2 http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/gfs/.

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