Before financing major urban transport projects, decisionmakers should attempt to put in place the basic elements for long-term sustainability of the sector. Specifically, the author contends that each large metropolitan area in Brazil should incorporate into its urban transport strategy, and...

Traditionally, transport regulation has been viewed as an exercise in second-best optimization, acknowledging the existence of huge information problems. Then the rail industry was deeply restructured worldwide to halt erosion of the sector's share of transportation markets. Restructuring took...

The author explores 20 criteria for a good road pricing system and presents case studies illustrating the costs, revenues, and benefits of alternative congestion charging mechanisms. The author finds that manual tollbooths are not suitable for congestion charging because they are land-, labor-,...

This report presents a methodological framework for reviewing the financial performance of government agencies responsible for transport. The framework is applied in a detailed case study in Tanzania (the transport infrastructure of which is seriously run down) and on desk studies in 14 other...

The issue of what to do with excess labor is critical to the success of any endeavour to improve the transport sector. Failure to reduce overstaffing leads to excessive wage bills. This exacerbates budget deficits and the losses of parastatal enterprises, which leads to cuts in investment or in...

The link between economic growth, and better provision of infrastructure services may be unproven, but it is clear that reforms to make infrastructure services more competitive (where possible), and to provide strong, and independent economic regulation of natural monopolies, do create an...

The Russian Federation has one of the richest natural resource endowments in the world. Despite their importance in the Russian economy, natural resources do not contribute as much as they could to public revenues. Large resource rents (excess payments, or above-normal profits generated by...

A successful poverty alleviation strategy has four distinct elements: 1) identifying who the poor are, where they are located, and what they do; 2) analyzing why they are poor; 3) developing policies to improve their standards of living; and 4) supplementing income-improving policies with...

As socialist countries move toward market systems, fiscal policy is an important part of their reform agenda. First, they need to reorient public spending to focus more on the provision of"public"goods. Second, they need to adopt more selective, predictable, and nondiscretionary means to finance...

Economists have stressed that the efficiency costs of taxation are not the obvious costs to taxpayers of handing over payments to the government. Instead, the efficiency costs stem from the efforts of taxpayers to avoid paying money to the government, whether it is consuming less of the taxed...