The impact of public capital on the US private economy: new evidence and analysis

摘要

This paper presents new evidence on the impact of public capital on the productivity of the US private sector. Using a production function approach, we estimate the impact of public investment on private capital productivity, specifically addressing the empirical critiques of earlier studies. We find evidence of a cointegrating relationship in a dynamic specification of an empirical model that includes public infrastructure as a factor of production, indicating the existence of a long-run relationship between the US public capital stock and the productivity of the private capital stock. The results are used to explore how the decline in the growth rate of the public capital stock would have affected the performance of the private sector.