A Database of World Stocks of Infrastructure: Update 1950-2005

The data covers road length, railway line length, electricity generating capacity, and number of telephone main lines. This data is an update of Canning (1998). Details of definitions and data construction can be found there. We give the infrastructure data set constructed by Canning (1998) together with the infrastructure data from the World Bank’s World Development Indicators 2006. The data sets are merged to give our best estimates of infrastructure over the period 1950-2005. The World Bank usually does not give any figures for infrastructure before 1980. Canning (1998) only goes up to 1995, so that by combining the two datasets we get a longer time series.