This paper analyses the degree to which infrastructure reliability and urban economic activity in several African cities is impacted by flooding. It combines firm-level micro data, flood maps, and several spatial data layers across cities through a harmonized geospatial network analysis. The...

This paper takes a first look at the trade effects of China's Belt and Road Initiative, also referred to as the New Silk Road, on the 71 countries potentially involved. The initiative consists of several infrastructure investment projects to improve the land and maritime transportation in the...

The Belt and Road Initiative, due to its diverse and extensive infrastructure investments, poses a wide range of environmental risks. Some projects have easily identifiable and measurable impacts, such as energy projects' greenhouse gas emissions. Others, such as transportation infrastructure,...

This paper develops a computable spatial equilibrium model of Central Asia and uses it to analyze the possible effects of the Belt Road Initiative on the economy of the region. The model captures international and subnational economic units and their connectivity to each other and the rest of...

The purpose of this policy note is to respond to the request from the Government of India for the World Bank to provide support to the development of the urban transport agenda in India and to provide lending support. During the discussions between the World Bank and the Government of India...

This report is intended to facilitate the discussions between the World Bank and the Governments of Tamil Nadu and Karnataka, City Governments of Chennai and Bangalore, on possibly expanding the Bank's urban transport assistance in these two cities, and elsewhere in the two states. The report...

This paper uses a popular web mapping and transportation service to generate information for more than 22 million counterfactual trip instances in 154 large Indian cities. It then develops a methodology to estimate robust indices of mobility for these cities. The estimation allows for an exact...

The six land corridors that are the 'Belt' part of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) connect more than sixty countries. As the initiative progresses, policy makers, analysts and researchers are trying to answer a few open questions of which the most common are: How can a country best benefit...

China's "Belt and Road Initiative" (BRI) includes major infrastructure investment projects - roads, ports, railways - that aim to improve connectivity along a number of transport corridors spanning 71 countries. In this paper we find that notwithstanding the large scale of the initiative,...

This paper examines the level of investment protection for selected countries along the Belt andRoad Initiative (BRI), based on coding the textual content of 17 investment laws and 648international investment agreements (IIAs). We find substantial heterogeneity in the levels ofprotection...