The paper: Benchmarking Infrastructure Using Public Investment Efficiency Frontiers (IMF Working papers).

What they do: The authors check empirically the input/output efficiency (not how much but how well given the resources used) of public investment in infrastructure across different countries and ways to model it, using a concept of efficiency based on how well other countries do it.

Key phrase: Removing all inefficiencies could increase infrastructure output by 55 percent overall, when averaging across 12 estimation approaches—in particular, by 45 percent for advanced economies, 54 percent for emerging countries, and 65 percent for low income countries. Infrastructure output would increase by a still-sizeable 30 percent if instead of eliminating all efficiency, countries achieved the efficiency level of their income group’s 90th percentile.

My summary: We could be doing so much more — provide better public services, better healthcare, faster growth — with the same resources. There are explanations, but not excuses.

Personal note: This is efficiency compared to what we know from experience we can do. How far behind are we from what we could really do - including advanced economies? One of the most frustrating aspects of the decade is how we're having to push against a backsliding of basic societal, physical, and knowledge infrastructures when we have tools that could allows us to explore new frontiers of widespread, sustainable social and economic progress. I have no right to be surprised by this: in the long term of history, the moving forward is the marvelous anomaly, the magic trick we have to figure out again every generation. But knowing we can do better — not out of hope but because we technically, empirically know it — means we have no excuse not to.