Capital projects : literature review and supplier survey

firms that provided equipment, materials, or services for the USAID projects. The assessment focuses on seven questions. (1) To what extent have capital projects leveraged other donor and private investor participation? (2) Have USAID capital projects generated post-project sales for U.S. firms? (3) Have they generated high economic rates of return? (4) Have they delivered important benefits to the private sector in developing countries or helped to reduce poverty or meet basic human needs? (5) How sustainable have they been? (6) Under what circumstances have they helped policy reform via conditionality? (7) Under what circumstances and to what extent have development and U.S. commercial interests been compatible? The study found a clear link between capital projects and economic development; reliable facilities for transportation, power, irrigation, communications, potable water, and sanitation are universally viewed as prerequisites to development, especially for private sector growth. The study also found that both World Bank and USAID projects must often deal with sustainability problems related to management, maintenance, and finance. Finally, in almost all cases, USAID capital projects had been designed to meet U.S. development objectives (poverty alleviation and meeting basic human needs) and only rarely to satisfy political or commercial interests; the projects have not been an important tool for developing commercial markets for U.S. exporters.