The growing trend of urban city development requires various infrastructure investments, including water supply, electricity, sanitation, transportation, and other supporting facilities. In facing this challenge, many Asian countries experience significant constraints, particularly on the issues...

Distribution of tax revenue among municipalities - which are constitutionally official federal entities in Brazil - is highly unequal vis-à-vis their demands of public services. Given conurbation processes and intense urbanization in the second half of the past century, some municipalities...

In many Asian countries, land acquisition is one of the main challenges for infrastructure development which delays the completion of projects and lowers the rate of return of infrastructure investment. This paper investigates the potential application of the land trust scheme, which Japan has...

Social infrastructure has endured a long period of neglect in most developed and emerging countries, with chronic underinvestment exposed by the coronavirus crisis 2020. The financial crisis 2007/08 led to a slow revival of economic infrastructure policies, and a growing involvement of...

When investigating the effects of federal grants on the behavior of lower-level governments, it is hard to defend the handling of grants as an exogenous factor affecting local governments; federal governments often set grants based on characteristics and performance of local governments. In this...

The COVID-19 pandemic highlights the importance of information and communications technology (ICT) not only for the economy but also for human well-being. However, the investment gap in ICT infrastructure has been growing and is expected to reach more than $30 billion by 2040. We argue that one...

What is the effect of e-commerce on the geographic distribution of local sales tax revenues? Using COVID-19 as a shock to online shopping and hand-collected high-frequency data on local sales tax revenue, we document an important shift in the state and local public finance landscape. As...

This paper investigates poverty alleviation efforts in China and the nature of governmententerprise partnerships there. We argue that firms partnering central and local governments can be an effective strategy to overcome resource-based obstacles in low-income markets. In China, local and...

If you look today at the skyline of downtowns throughout the Middle East and beyond, the joint-stock corporation has transformed the urban landscape. The corporation makes itself present through the proliferation of its urban mega-projects, including skyscrapers, downtown developments and gated...

In 2008 the Ministry of Development, Public Works and Housing (now the Ministry of Regional Development and Public Administration) prepared the growth poles policy for Romania, establishing seven growth poles to be financed through the Regional Operational Programme 2007-1013, under the Priority...