"background": "Municipal infrastructure asset systems in many developing nations face severe financial constraints, yet robust frameworks for diagnosing their cost-effectiveness are scarce. Existing evaluations often lack the methodological rigour to isolate the impact of management interventions from confounding external factors. ", "purpose and objectives": "This case study aimed to develop and apply a quasi-experimental framework to diagnose the cost-effectiveness of municipal infrastructure asset management. The objective was to measure the causal effect of specific maintenance strategies on long-term lifecycle costs and service delivery. ", "methodology": "A longitudinal, difference-in-differences design was employed, comparing asset cohorts under different management regimes. The core cost-effectiveness metric was modelled using a fixed-effects regression: C{it = \ + \ Tit + \ Xit + \₈ₓ, where C is lifecycle cost, T is the treatment indicator, and X are time-varying controls. Inference was based on cluster-robust standard errors to account for municipal-level correlations. ", "findings": "The framework successfully identified a significant differential in cost trajectories. Assets under a proactive, scheduled maintenance regime demonstrated a 22% lower mean normalised lifecycle cost over the observation period compared to those under reactive maintenance. The associated treatment effect estimate was statistically significant at the 5% level. ", "conclusion": "The quasi-experimental design provides a viable, rigorous method for diagnosing cost-effectiveness in complex, real-world infrastructure systems where randomised controlled trials are impractical. It moves beyond descriptive analysis to causal inference. ", "recommendations": "Municipal asset managers should adopt quasi-experimental diagnostics for periodic system audits. National infrastructure agencies should integrate such frameworks into performance benchmarking guidelines to enable comparative analysis across regions. ", "key words": "asset management, cost-effectiveness, difference-in-differences, infrastructure, lifecycle costing, quasi-experimental, municipal engineering", "contribution statement": "This study presents a novel application of a quasi-experimental, causal inference framework to municipal infrastructure asset systems
Okonkwo et al. (Tue,) studied this question.