A New Index for Public Investment Management

Abstract

The objective of this article is to improve the most widely used indicator of quality in public investment management (the PIMI). The methodology was to use an alternative algorithm to build a new version of the PIMI and calculate it for sixteen Latin American countries. The result is a New PIMI that appears better than the original one, as it has a positive correlation with an objective indicator of the efficiency of public investment, which is not achieved by the original PIMI. We recommend the use of the New PIMI, proposed here, as a control variable in studies on aggregated public investment and its impacts on economic growth and social welfare. One limitation of the New PIMI is that it reflects the quality of public investment management at the aggregate level and based on de jure criteria, thus not capturing key differences that occur at a more disaggregated or informal level. Even so, the relevance, originality and replicability of the New PIMI make it a significant contribution to knowledge in this field.