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...

Since South Africa held its first democratic elections in 1994, it has given significant attention to building an effective system of decentralization including provincial and local government. While provincial governments are responsible mainly for the implementation of social services such as...

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...

Over the past two decades developing countries have seen a rapid increase in the number of women taking an active role in the labor market. While acknowledging that this is an important development outcome, this paper cautions against the possible undesired distributional effects that it can...

This paper uses simple analytical models to study high-income donor countries' willingness to pay to supply mitigation finance to low-income countries; how this depends on modality for finance supply; and how it changes as the global greenhouse gas mitigation agenda moves forward. The paper...