| | I am grateful to T C A Anant, Lee Benham, Neha Jain, J V Meenakshi,
Partha Mukhopadhyay, Anusha Nath, Bharat Ramaswami and Rohini
Somanathan for their comments and suggestions. Atika Gupta and
Nitya Mittal provided excellent research support. Digvijay Negi, Nitin
Madan and Pawan Gopalakrishnan provided crucial help in compilation
of an extensive dataset. Finally, I thank the Centre for Development
Economics for research and institutional support.
Ram Singh (ramsingh@econdse.org) is with the department
of economics at the Delhi School of Economics.
This study, based on a large dataset of 894 projects from
17 infrastructure sectors, attempts to answer certain
important questions on time and cost overruns in
publicly-funded infrastructure projects: How common
and how large are the overruns? What are the essential
causes? Are contractual and institutional failures among
the significant causes? What are the policy implications
for planning, development and implementation of
infrastructure projects? Among other results of an
econometric analysis, the study shows that the
contractual and institutional failures are economically
and statistically significant causes behind cost and
time overruns.
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