Disruption of infrastructure services can cause significant social and economic losses, particularly in the event of a natural disaster. The World Bank Group and the Government of Japan established the Quality Infrastructure Investment Partnership to focus attention on the quality dimensions of...

Empirical explorations of the growth and productivity impacts of infrastructure have been characterized by ambiguous (countervailing signs) results with little robustness. A number of explanations of the contradictory findings have been proposed. These range from the crowd-out of private by...

The paper provides a first systematic, comprehensive benchmarking of South Africa's infrastructure performance in four major sectors - electricity, water and sanitation, information and communication technology, and transportation - against the relevant group of comparator countries using a new...

The potentially-adverse impact of salinity on paved roads is well-established in the engineering literature. The problem seems destined to grow, as climate-related changes in sea level and riverine flows drive future increases in groundwater salinity. However, data scarcity has prevented...

Ho Chi Minh City faces significant and growing flood risk. Recent risk reduction efforts may be insufficient as climate and socio-economic conditions diverge from projections made when those efforts were initially planned. This study demonstrates how robust decision making can help Ho Chi Minh...

Two-thirds of Bangladesh is less than 5 meters above sea level, making it one of the most flood prone countries in the world. Severe flooding during a monsoon causes significant damage to crops and property, with severe adverse impacts on rural livelihoods. Future climate change seems likely to...

This paper presents a structural general equilibrium model to analyze the effects on trade, welfare, and gross domestic product of common transport infrastructure. Specifically, the model builds on the framework by Caliendo and Parro (2015) -- a Ricardian model with sectoral linkages, trade in...

The Belt and Road Initiative, due to its diverse and extensive infrastructure investments, poses a wide range of environmental risks. Some projects have easily identifiable and measurable impacts, such as energy projects' greenhouse gas emissions. Others, such as transportation infrastructure,...

There is a long-standing debate over whether new roads unavoidably lead to environmental damage, especially forest loss, but causal identification has been elusive. Using multiple causal identification strategies, this paper studies the construction of new rural roads to over 100,000 villages...

China has used two main spatial policies to shape its geographic patterns of development: restricted labor mobility through the Hukou residential registration system and massive infrastructure investment, notably a 96,000 kilometer national expressway network. This paper develops a structural...