Economically efficient prices for the passenger transportation system in the Greater Cairo Metropolitan Area would account for broader societal costs of traffic congestion and accidents, and local and global pollution. A $2.20 per gallon gasoline tax (2006 US$) would be economically efficient,...

Like in many large cities in developing countries, traffic in Grand Casablanca, Morocco, is congested and public buses are crowded. These conditions are alleviated by a combination of supply-side infrastructure expansions, such as more buses and new road capacity, and demand-side pricing...

The authors use a computable general equilibrium model to estimate the marginal cost of public funds (MCF) for taxes on domestic goods, exports, imports, capital, and labor in 38 African countries. The resulting MCF estimates provide directions for tax reform in Africa. The authors investigate...

It is widely accepted that the costs of underpricing energy are large, whether in advanced or developing countries. This paper explores how large these costs can be by focussing on the size of the external effects that energy subsidies in particular generate in two important sectors?transport...

Beirut, the capital city of Lebanon, faces huge traffic congestion, the cost of which is estimated to be more than 2 percent of the city's gross regional product. Effective policies are needed, based on weighing their overall economic cost and benefit to society. This study developed an...

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...

To analyze the effect of an increase in the quantity or quality of public investment on growth, this paper extends the World Bank?s Long-Term Growth Model (LTGM), by separating the total capital stock into public and private portions, with the former adjusted for its quality. The paper presents...

Governments of developing countries typically spend between 20 and 30 percent of gross domestic product. Hence, small changes in the efficiency of public spending could have a major impact on aggregate productivity growth and gross domestic product levels. Therefore, measuring efficiency and...

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...

This study argues that public infrastructure is an important though previously neglected driving mechanism of the structural transformation process. To assess its significance quantitatively, this study first develops a multisector neoclassical growth model with heterogeneous firms, where public...