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Abundant empirical evidence links well-functioning institutions and good governance to better economic and social outcomes. It is thus an important challenge to determine which conjunction of factors produces better institutions. Along this line, the objective of this paper is twofold. First, it examines the existing results of the literature on this matter in a critical way, tries to assess their robustness, and explores alternative methodology. Second, it makes use of a more comprehensive database, including all the aspects previously analyzed in a separate manner, to derive systematic empirical results. After discussing the traditional robustness checks employed, for example, in the empirical growth literature, which appear to be of limited usefulness, we introduce factor analysis as a preliminary step toward model specification and subsequently perform multiple regression analysis. Of the four levels of explanation that we identify, namely control and historical variables, the nature of the political game, the size and nature of existing rents to be allocated, and the nature and quality of bureaucratic incentives, the later appears to be the more clearly linked to institutional quality. However, the results prove not robust when dealing with endogeneity problems. Various kinds of interactions and non-linear effects are also investigated, yielding no clear insights. We conclude regarding the fragility of existing data, in particular with respect to the incentive structure, and the need for a better theoretical understanding of the underlying mechanisms.

National audience ; The question of infrastructure needs is a crucial policy one in Latin America, given evidence of large access shortfalls across all major types of infrastructure, and the increase in demand linked to the rapid growth in households' income over the past two decades. However, how much and how fast countries should invest in each of the main infrastructure areas are largely speculative, as to date, literature on investment needs has relied exclusively on aggregate data and cross-country regressions, ignoring both potential policy and supply-side differences across settings, and variations in demand along the income distribution. This paper addresses these shortcomings, providing building blocks to better assess infrastructure investment needs across the region. It does so documenting access to services and ownership of infrastructure-related durables in the water, energy, telecom, and transport areas, based on harmonized household survey data covering 1.6 million households in 14 Latin American countries from 1992 to –2012. It provides a systematic disaggregation of access and ownership rates at different levels of income and over time, and econometrically derives the country infrastructure premium, a measure of how much a household benefits from simply being located in a given country. Within countries, the results show extensive inequality of access across the income distribution, but this is also the case for households at similar levels of income across countries. Few country fundamentals appear to be significant in explaining this variability, pointing to differences in policy choices and local constraints as important determinants. The paper derives disaggregated income elasticity measures for the full set of infrastructure indicators and uses these to estimate the time that would be needed to close the remaining gap for households at different levels of the income distribution in each country under a "business as usual" hypothesis. Under that scenario, universal access appears to still be ...