This paper describes a parsimonious approach to the economic analysis of transportation investments. In a gravity model of trade, project benefits may be summarized by a money metric for the change in market access experienced by all cities due to the investment. This metric is equivalent to the...

Disruption of infrastructure services can cause significant social and economic losses, particularly in the event of a natural disaster. The World Bank Group and the Government of Japan established the Quality Infrastructure Investment Partnership to focus attention on the quality dimensions of...

There is a long-standing debate over whether new roads unavoidably lead to environmental damage, especially forest loss, but causal identification has been elusive. Using multiple causal identification strategies, this paper studies the construction of new rural roads to over 100,000 villages...

This paper uses the construction of India's Golden Quadrangle central highway network, together with comprehensive loan data from the Reserve Bank of India, to investigate the interaction between infrastructure development and financial sector depth. The paper identifies a disproportionate...

This study explores the role of governance in improving infrastructure reliability. It estimates that increasing infrastructure spending and improving governance in parallel is six times more effective at enhancing transport system performance than increasing spending alone. It also estimates...

This paper provides a framework to assess the impact of infrastructure investment expected under the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) on the debt vulnerabilities of countries that are located on BRI transport and connectivity corridors in the absence of comprehensive and consistent information on...