Government entities in India hold large amounts of public land. Their landholdings include some of the most valuable property in the country. Parts of this patrimony lie vacant or underutilized. Public sector bodies also own large blocs of land that sometimes stand in the way of efficient...

Land assets have become an important source of financing capital investments by subnational governments in developing countries. Land assets, often with billions of dollars per transaction, rival and sometimes surpass subnational borrowing or fiscal transfers for capital spending. While reducing...

A number of recent papers have argued that social transfers may be necessary to secure Pareto optimality, if there is utility interdependence between potential donors and potential recipients. This paper establishes the types of welfare support plans that would be Pareto-optimal on different...

Working Paper No. 91 is published as "Price and Privatization of Public Services". In Edward M. Gramlich and Bengt-Christer Ysander (eds.), Control of Local Covernment. IUI Conference Reports 1985:1. Stockholm: Industrial Institute for Economic and Social Research, 1985.

Urban growth throughout the developing world has created a challenge for financing infrastructure. Investment in infrastructure is needed to provide basic services for newly developed parts of urban areas. It is needed to meet the demand for a safer and more reliable water supply, higher...

Despite strong economic growth, investment in basic urban infrastructure -- water supply, wastewater removal and treatment, roads, and other capital-intensive systems -- has failed to keep pace with urban growth, leaving a critical urban infrastructure deficit. At the same time, urban lands in...

This book, Financing cities, emphasized case studies on different topics to look at the interactions of a range of variables and factors and to see how they fit together. Rather than require each case to follow the same format, the authors have structured their papers around the issues that...