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 review examines the literature on the welfare impacts of infrastructure disruptions. There is widespread evidence that households suffer from the consequences of a lack of infrastructure reliability, and that being connected to the grid is not sufficient to close the infrastructure gap....

This study constructs a microdata set of about 143,000 firms to estimate the monetary costs of infrastructure disruptions in 137 low- and middle-income countries, representing 78 percent of the world population and 80 percent of the GDP of low- and -middle-income countries. Specifically, this...

This paper explores the benefits and the costs of strengthening infrastructure assets to make them more resilient, reducing the repair costs and infrastructure disruptions caused by natural hazards. Strengthening infrastructure assets in low- and middle-income countries would increase investment...

This review examines the literature on the role of infrastructure in determining the productivity and competitiveness of firms. It shows that the existing evidence base is clear in concluding that reliable and high-quality infrastructure is a crucial foundation for enabling businesses to thrive....

Traditional risk assessments use asset losses as the main metric to measure the severity of a disaster. This paper proposes an expanded risk assessment based on a framework that adds socioeconomic resilience and uses wellbeing losses as its main measure of disaster severity. Using a new,...

Dar es Salaam is frequently affected by severe flooding causing destruction and impeding daily life of its 4.5 million inhabitants. The focus of this paper is on the role of poverty in the impact of floods on households, focusing on both direct (damage to or loss of assets or property) and...

This paper investigates the costs and benefits of three ex ante flood management strategies - risk-based insurance, zoning, and subsidized insurance - in an urban economics framework that takes land scarcity into account. In a theoretical setting and in the absence of market failures, risk-based...

Traditional risk assessments use asset losses as the main metric to measure the severity of a disaster. This paper proposes an expanded risk assessment based on a framework that adds socioeconomic resilience and uses wellbeing losses as the main measure of disaster severity. Using an agent-based...

In June 2015, about 53,000 people were affected by unusually severe floods in the Greater Accra Metropolitan Area, Ghana. The real impact of such a disaster is a product of exposure ("Who was affected?"), vulnerability ("How much did the affected households lose?"), and socioeconomic resilience...