The paper provides three principal results. First, we benchmark South African infrastructure performance in terms of access, pricing, and quality against key comparator groups of countries using the most recent World Bank benchmarking data base (2005). Second, we establish clear empirical links...

We study the dispersion in rates of provincial economic- and TFP growth in China. Our results show that regional growth patterns can be understood as a function of several interrelated factors, which include investment in physical capital, human capital, and infrastructure capital; the infusion...

Turbulence has been the hallmark of the course of Indonesian economic growth. Indonesia was dubbed a “chronic drop-out” in economic performance in 1968, but it then immediately embarked on a growth spurt. Just as accolades to Indonesia's economic pragmatism and economic orthodoxy were...

This paper examines the relationship between corruption and infrastructure at both the country and regional level using the World Bank’s Enterprise Surveys data. A statistically significant and considerable relationship is established between the measure of corruption in the macro data and the...

In recent years, the largest Polish cities have experienced intensive suburbanization processes. People migrate to suburban communes and hitherto undeveloped areas change their function towards single- or multi-family residential neighbourhoods. Spontaneous and dispersed suburbanization...

Latin America is enjoying a period of extensive growth. If this trend is to continue into the coming years, the key insufficiencies that could limit total factor productivity will have to be dealt with in order to prevent bottlenecks. One of these insufficiencies is the infrastructure gap. The...

Latin America is enjoying a period of extensive growth. If this trend is to continue into the coming years, the key insufficiencies that could limit total factor productivity will have to be dealt with in order to prevent bottlenecks. One of these insufficiencies is the infrastructure gap. The...

We analyse various pathways through which access to electricity affects fertility, using a pseudo-panel of Indonesian districts covering the period 1993-2010. Identification of causal effects relies on a district-fixed effects approach and controlling for local economic development. The...

A rolling blackout in Colombia in the early 1990s led to a rise in unplanned births, according to research by Amar Shanghavi and colleagues. What's more, young women who became mothers after the blackout had worse outcomes in later life. The impact of power outages on fertility is an important...

As planned large investments in road infrastructure continue to be high on the agenda of many African countries, only few of these countries have actually ammended their investments strategy. In many cases, there seems to be a preference for a status quo that can easily be explained by political...