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September 24, 2019 | English | Sami Atallah, Georgia Dagher, and Mounir Mahmalat
CEDRE Capital Investment Plan: Scrutinizing the Allocation of Projects and Funds Across Regions

Large disparities in infrastructure quality have exacerbated persistent regional inequalities in economic development. In order to tackle this issue, the government developed a Capital Investment Plan (CIP), outlining269 projects in all major infrastructure sectors of the economy. The plan was presented at the Conférence économique pour le développement, par les réformes et avec les entreprises (CEDRE), and received funding pledges amounting to $11.06 billion, equivalent to roughly a fifth of the national GDP. As the prevailing patterns of resource allocation have failed to reduce regional inequality in the past, the geographical distribution of funds outlined in the CIP warrants scrutiny. To that end, this brief analyzes the allocation of infrastructure projects summarized in the CIP and maps the distribution of funds across regions and districts. We test the relationship of a set of socio-economic variables to the allocation of funds per district to assess the extent to which the distribution of projects follows assessments of need. We find that a poorer quality of infrastructure, lower level of economic development or amount of municipal funding, as well as a higher prevalence of poverty or presence of refugees fail to explain the large variation in the allocation of funds across districts.