Empirical explorations of the growth and productivity impacts of infrastructure have been characterized by ambiguous (countervailing signs) results with little robustness. A number of explanations of the contradictory findings have been proposed. These range from the crowd-out of private by...

The paper provides a first systematic, comprehensive benchmarking of South Africa's infrastructure performance in four major sectors - electricity, water and sanitation, information and communication technology, and transportation - against the relevant group of comparator countries using a new...

The author provides a preliminary benchmarking of infrastructure performance in Lesotho in four major sectors - electricity, water and sanitation, information and communication technology, and road transportation - against the relevant group of comparator countries using a new World Bank...

The paper provides a first, systematic benchmarking of infrastructure performance in the Southern African Customs Union (SACU) countries (South Africa, Botswana, Lesotho, Namibia, and Swaziland) in four major sectors-electricity, water and sanitation, information and communication technology,...

The authors use a panel-data set for the period 1980-2002 to estimate demand for electricity and telecommunications services and project investment needs in South Africa through 2010 for two growth scenarios. Projections of average annual investment needs in electricity and telecommunications...

One of the contentious issues in electricity reform is whether there are significant gains from restructuring systems that are moderately well run. South Africa's electricity system is a case in point. The sector's state-owned utility, Eskom, has been generating some of the lowest-priced...