Improving Transport Project Appraisals
In the Islamic Countries
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cases the push to improve internal capacity is often weak leading to no systematic training and
dissemination activities.
A good practice is the establishment, at central or sectoral level, knowledge centres with state-of
art expertise which are constantly monitored and updated. Such units can be internal to the
procurement administration or external in a formor public agency or publicly funded body. Such
entities can provide support and technical assistance to design, contract, perform or review
project appraisal reports. Chilean experience represents a significant example in this respect.
Actually, one of the main activities of the national coordinating body in the context of the
National Investment System has been the training of public officials in the preparation and
appraisal of projects at all levels of government. As reported by Gómez-Lobo (2012) this effort
was aided through partnerships with academic institutions and after more than 30 years of
training efforts, it can be said that nowadays there is an “appraisal culture” within the Chilean
public sector.
Another option is the establishment of a dedicated programme. An example is the Joint Assistance
to Support Projects in European Regions (JASPERS) initiative, as illustrated further in section
3.3.3.
Regardless the level and nature of the required expertise, a systematic monitoring needs to be
in place to ensure high-level capacity, keeping under close scrutiny the needs in terms of both
staff and skills. A cyclical gap-analysis is to be complemented by a tailored training and
dissemination programme , aiming to align internal capacity to state-of-the-art methodologies.
Beyond a mere enquiry on the delivery of training, however, the analysis will also focus on its
quality standards and how these are set.
Ad 2) Standards
The definition of standards and common reference in project appraisal responds to the need to
ensure consistency and reduce discretionality in the way the appraisal is performed. It can also
make the life of project analysts easier by providing off-the-shelf methods and tools since there
is generally large rooms of manoeuvre to interpret and put general methodological
requirements into practice. It can also imply to perform ad-hoc data collection and processing
to estimate parameters and unit values which need specific expertise.
There is of course a trade-off between the level of prescription and the flexibility that needs to
be ensured to reflect the specificities of individual projects. The definition of counterfactual
scenario or the assumptions underpinning demand projections are for example just two
dimensions that do not lend themselves particularly well to standardisation.
An important aspect of standardisation is the definition of common values and parameters to be
used in the analysis. Values such as discount rates or shadow prices may reflect policy
considerations and preferences. They also may require specific technical expertise and data to
be estimated, so that it is not efficient or advisable to have ad-hoc estimations made on purpose
and project-by-project.