The Economics Of Infrastructure Provisioning

In this volume, experts from Europe, North and South America and Asia examine the complexities of financing, installing, implementing and regulating public infrastructures. Employing a range of methodological approaches, including historical and empirical research, analytical models, theoretical analysis and sector and regional case studies, they consider the economics of infrastructure provisioning by government, through private-public partnerships and privatisation arrangements. After first treating general investment, growth and policy issues, they then offer sector-specific analyses of transportation, energy, telecommunications and water infrastructures.

Infrastructure is an important activity both for business enterprises and government. Traditionally, infrastructure provisioning has been left to the government since it was perceived as a public good and, therefore, as having a free rider problem. Conventional wisdom indicated that such projects were unlikely to generate adequate revenue in the marketplace to offset the costs of their provisioning; thus funding and management of such projects have been relegated to government. However, over the years, questions have been raised regarding the effectiveness of government in provisioning and managing infrastructure projects. A decaying infrastructure of poor quality, combined with inadequate government funding, has compelled economists and managers from both the public and private sectors to re-think the provisioning of infrastructure projects. The initial reaction to this phenomenon among stakeholders has not been whether infrastructure should have public (government) provision or private financing, but whether a privately-financed investment in infrastructure should be made at all. Unsurprisingly, faced with these choices, governments have embraced private financing, resulting in the rise of public-private-partnerships to deal with the infrastructure question. PPPs, which solicit both funds and private sector expertise for infrastructure projects, have found many supporters in recent times, and governments have embraced them with open arms since such partnerships do government’s job without depending on government financing. However, nothing comes free, and PPP has its own drawbacks, the principal ones being a higher tariff on the user public and the limited capacity of government to handle PPP well. The book describes the characteristics of infrastructure projects, the inadequacies of making infrastructure exclusively a public concern, the rise of PPPs, and the economics of their pricing, investment and regulation.

Although funding infrastructure has always been a challenging issue in any country and at any time, the topic is still largely unexplored. A European history of infrastructure financing over the long term does not yet exist, and the purpose of this book is to partially fill that gap. It explores the diverse historical paths pursued in order to solve the problem of infrastructure finance in various European countries, drawing upon the findings of an international and interdisciplinary research project. Economic historians, economists, and engineers grouped together to investigate case studies showing paradigmatic examples and to unravel their specificities across the Old Continent by combining evidence from the literature and untapped sources. The volume is structured into four sections; after an introductory chapter by the editors, the first section offers 'horizontal' contributions that encompass the entire history of European infrastructure finance. The other three sections deal with one single sector each, namely water, transport, and telecommunications. The recipients of this investigation are not only economic historians but also all those who deal with infrastructure planning, such as policymakers, economists, and engineers, who have to disentangle complex problems relating to financing issues. They all can draw from these chapters' original insights and interactions between theory and policy issues. The book shows that one single pattern fitting all does not exist in infrastructure financing, and it invites us to consider history as a research laboratory in which to understand why the economic and financial dogmas of our times are challenged by past experience.--

There is widespread acceptance of the importance of infrastructure, but less agreement about how it should be funded and procured. While most public infrastructure is still provided in-house or by traditional procurement methods – with well-researched strengths and weaknesses – the development of service concession arrangements has seen a greater emphasis on lifecycle costing, risk assessment and asset design as featured in a variety of public private partnership (PPP) delivery models. This book examines the various procurement approaches, and provides a framework for comparing their advantages and disadvantages. Drawing on international experience, it considers some of the best and worst examples of PPPs, and infrastructure projects generally, along with the lessons for improving infrastructure procurement processes.

First, the book documents the evolution of Asia's infrastructure over the past half-century and reviews existing literature on the role of infrastructure investment in supporting growth and social development. It highlights the positive impact of mass transit investments on land and property values, and the possibility of taxing the increase in values to finance these investments. It then examines Asia's current practices and new solutions that can help meet the infrastructure gap. It discusses the role of institutions, how innovation can foster energy infrastructure investments, and the role of bond markets in infrastructure investments. The book explores ASEAN+3 efforts in developing local currency bond markets to provide long-term local financing for infrastructure investment while providing financial resilience. It also examines the use of green bonds to finance sustainable growth in Asia.

Contemporary forms of infrastructural development herald alternative futures through their incorporation of digital technologies, mobile capital, international politics and the promises and fears of enhanced connectivity. In tandem with increasing concerns about climate change and the anthropocene, there is further an urgency around contemporary infrastructural provision: a concern about its fragility, and an awareness that these connective, relational systems significantly shape both local and planetary futures in ways that we need to understand more clearly. Offering a rich set of empirically detailed and conceptually sophisticated studies of infrastructural systems and experiments, present and past, contributors to this volume address both the transformative potential of infrastructural systems and their stasis. Covering infrastructural figures; their ontologies, epistemologies, classifications and politics, and spanning development, urban, energy, environmental and information infrastructures, the chapters explore both the promises and failures of infrastructure. Tracing the experimental histories of a wide range of infrastructures and documenting their variable outcomes, the volume offers a unique set of analytical perspectives on contemporary infrastructural complications. These studies bring a systematic empirical and analytical attention to human worlds as they intersect with more-than-human worlds, whether technological or biological.

Experts bring economic tools to bear on philanthropic activities, addressing topics that range from the determinants of giving to the effectiveness of fundraising techniques. Economists are increasingly aware of the need to better understand philanthropic activities. In this book, economists address a variety of topics related to the economics of philanthropy, ranging from the determinants of giving to the effectiveness of fundraising techniques. The contributions focus on individual motives for giving and volunteering, and in particular how they affect donation outcomes, fundraising decisions, and public policies toward giving. Previous research has viewed motives for giving as embedded in formal models of economic behavior with rational agents who maximize their own utility while constrained by a budget. These models, however, have been shown to have poor predictive power, neglecting direct and indirect motives for giving. The contributors consider, among other subjects, the free-riding problem in these models; altruistic, direct, and indirect motives for giving, addressed both theoretically and with lab experiments; the linear public good game; the role of social information; the effectiveness of matching gifts and premiums; motives for unpaid volunteering; subscription models as a way to regulate revenue streams; and increasing reliance on public funds. Contributors James Andreoni, Jon Behar, Avner Ben-Ner, Ted Bergstrom, Greg Bose, Sarah Brown, Catherine C. Eckel, Christina Gravert, David H. Herberich, Samantha Horn, Fantingyu Hu, Dean Karlan, Ann-Kathrin Koessler, Benjamin M. Marx, Jonathan Meer, Michael Menietti, Bradley Minaker, Mark Ottoni-Wilhelm, A. Abigail Payne, Maria P. Recalde, Kimberley Scharf, Claudia Schwirplies, Marta Serra-Garcia, Sarah Smith, Karl Taylor, Mette Trier Damgaard, Lise Vesterlund, Laura Villalobos

Insights from the application of economic theories and research methods to the management of linguistic diversity in an era of globalization. In an era of globalization, issues of language diversity have economic and political implications. Transnational labor mobility, trade, social inclusion of migrants, democracy in multilingual countries, and companies' international competitiveness all have a linguistic dimension; yet economists in general do not include language as a variable in their research. This volume demonstrates that the application of rigorous economic theories and research methods to issues of language policy yields valuable insights. The contributors offer both theoretical and empirical analyses of such topics as the impact of language diversity on economic outcomes, the distributive effects of policy regarding official languages, the individual welfare consequences of bilingualism, and the link between language and national identity. Their research is based on data from countries including Canada, India, Kazakhstan, and Indonesia and from the regions of Central America, Europe, and Sub-Saharan Africa. Theoretical models are explained intuitively for the nonspecialist. The relationships among linguistic variables, inequality, and the economy are approached from different perspectives, including economics, sociolinguistics, and political science. For this reason, the book offers a substantive contribution to interdisciplinary work on languages in society and language policy, proposing a common framework for a shared research area. Contributors Alisher Aldashev, Katalin Buzási, Ramon Caminal, Alexander M. Danzer, Maxime Leblanc Desgagné, Peter H. Egger, Ainhoa Aparicio Fenoll, Michele Gazzola, Victor Ginsburgh, Gilles Grenier, François Grin, Zoe Kuehn, Andrea Lassmann, Stephen May, Serge Nadeau, Suzanne Romaine, Selma K. Sonntag, Stefan Sperlich, José-Ramón Uriarte, François Vaillancourt, Shlomo Weber, Bengt-Arne Wickström, Lauren Zentz