The Impact of Public Investment on Private Investment: A Disaggregated Analysis

The impact of public investment on private investment has been a matter of great interest in economic literature. Classical economists believed that public investment crowds out private investment. While Keynesian economists counter this argument and argued that public investment increases or crowds in private investment because of the multiplier effect. Many of the empirical studies have directly examined this by testing whether a statistically significant relationship exists or not, between public investment and private investment. The empirical work appears with mixed statistical results on the relationship between public and private investment. Results of Erenburg and Wohar (1995), Pereira (2001, 2003), Pereira and Roca-Sagales (2001), Hyder (2002) and Naqvi (2002) showed that public investment crowds in private investment while Pradhan, Ratha and Sarma (1990), Haque and Montiel (1993), Ahmed (1994), Voss (2002) and Narayan (2004) showed that public investment crowds out private investment.