IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/cde/cdewps/181.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Delays and Cost Overruns in Infrastructure Projects -- An Enquiry into Extents, Causes and Remedies

Author

Listed:
  • Ram Singh

    (Department of Economics, Delhi School of Economics, Delhi, India)

Abstract

Media reports abound on instances of prolonged delays and excessive cost overruns in infrastructure projects. Only a small number of projects get delivered in time and within the budget. Examples of successful project implementation, like construction of the Delhi Metro Rail, are few and appear only far in between. Indeed, the problem of time and cost overruns in India is widespread and severe. Yet, very few empirical studies exist on the subject. Even rarer are the studies based on completed projects. As a result, the extents as well as the causes behind delays and cost overruns have remained under-researched. This study investigates the various issues related to delays and cost overruns in publically funded infrastructure projects. The following questions are posed and answered -- How common and how large are the time and the cost overruns? What are the essential causes behind these delays and cost overruns? Are the underlying causes statistically significant? Are Contractual and Institutional failures among the significant causes? What are the policy implications for planning, development and implementation of infrastructure projects? The study is based on, by far, the largest dataset of 894 projects from seventeen infrastructure sectors. Among other results, it shows that the contractual and the institutional failures are economically and statistically significant causes behind cost and time overruns.

Suggested Citation

  • Ram Singh, 2009. "Delays and Cost Overruns in Infrastructure Projects -- An Enquiry into Extents, Causes and Remedies," Working papers 181, Centre for Development Economics, Delhi School of Economics.
    • Handle: RePEc:cde:cdewps:181
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.cdedse.org/pdf/work181.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Cesare Dosi & Michele Moretto, 2015. "Procurement with Unenforceable Contract Time and the Law of Liquidated Damages," The Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization, Oxford University Press, vol. 31(1), pages 160-186.
    2. Ihsan Issa Ahmad Hosani & Fikri T. Dweiri & Udechukwu Ojiako, 0. "A study of cost overruns in complex multi-stakeholder road projects in the United Arab Emirates," International Journal of System Assurance Engineering and Management, Springer;The Society for Reliability, Engineering Quality and Operations Management (SREQOM),India, and Division of Operation and Maintenance, Lulea University of Technology, Sweden, vol. 0, pages 1-10.
    3. Santanu Chatterjee & Olaf Posch & Dennis Wesselbaum, 2017. "Delays in Public Goods," Working Papers 1702, University of Otago, Department of Economics, revised Feb 2017.
    4. James Odeck, 2019. "Variation in cost overruns of transportation projects: an econometric meta-regression analysis of studies reported in the literature," Transportation, Springer, vol. 46(4), pages 1345-1368, August.
    5. Lundberg, Mattias & Jenpanitsub, Anchalee & Pyddoke, Roger, 2011. "Cost overruns in Swedish transport projects," Working papers in Transport Economics 2011:11, CTS - Centre for Transport Studies Stockholm (KTH and VTI).
    6. Ihsan Issa Ahmad Hosani & Fikri T. Dweiri & Udechukwu Ojiako, 2020. "A study of cost overruns in complex multi-stakeholder road projects in the United Arab Emirates," International Journal of System Assurance Engineering and Management, Springer;The Society for Reliability, Engineering Quality and Operations Management (SREQOM),India, and Division of Operation and Maintenance, Lulea University of Technology, Sweden, vol. 11(6), pages 1250-1259, December.
    7. Molinari, Laura & Haezendonck, Elvira & Mabillard, Vincent, 2023. "Cost overruns of Belgian transport infrastructure projects: Analyzing variations over three land transport modes and two project phases," Transport Policy, Elsevier, vol. 134(C), pages 167-179.
    8. Shenzhe Jiang & Junjie Xia & Jiajun Xu & Jianye Yan, 2023. "A theory of National Development Bank: long-term investment and the agency problem," Economic Theory, Springer;Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory (SAET), vol. 76(3), pages 995-1024, October.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Delays; Cost Overruns; Time Overruns; Infrastructure; Projects; Causes; Contractual Failures; Organizational Failures; Institutional Failures;
    All these keywords.

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cde:cdewps:181. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sanjeev Sharma (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/cdudein.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.