Cecilia Briceno-Garmendia

Infrastructure Services in Developing Countries: Access, Quality, Costs, and Policy Reform

The authors review the evidence on the state of infrastructure in the developing world, emphasizing the investment needs and the emerging policy issues. While their assessment is seriously constrained by data gaps, they provide useful insights on the main challenges ahead, emphasizing that, in addition to the widely discussed access problems, the poorest also face major affordability and service quality issues which were not well addressed by the reforms of the 1990s. The authors make a case for a stronger commitment of the international community to generate the information needed to assess and monitor infrastructure needs and policies.

Power Tariffs: Caught between Cost Recovery and Affordability

This is the first paper to build a comprehensive empirical picture of power pricing practices across Sub-Saharan Africa, based on a new database of tariff structures in 27 countries for the years 2004-2008. Using a variety of quantitative indicators, the paper evaluates the performance of electricity tariffs against four key policy objectives: recovery of historic power production costs, efficient signaling of future power production costs, affordability to low income households, and distributional equity. As regards cost recovery, 80 percent of the countries in the sample fully recover operating costs, while only around 30 percent of the countries are practicing full recovery of capital costs. However, due to the fact that future power development may be based on a shift toward more economic technologies than those available in the past, existing tariffs look as though they would be consistent with Long Run Marginal Costs in nearly 40 percent of countries and hence provide efficient pricing signals. As regards affordability, todays average effective tariffs are affordable for 90 percent of todays customers. However, they would only be affordable for 25 percent of households that remain unconnected to the grid. Tariffs consistent with full recovery of economic costs would be affordable for 70 percent of the population. As regards equity, the highly regressive patterns of access to power services, ensure that subsidies delivered through electricity tariffs are without exception also highly regressive in distributional incidence. The conclusion is that achieving all four of these policy objectives simultaneously is almost impossible in the context of the high-cost low-income environment that characterizes much of SSA today. Hence most countries find themselves caught between cost recovery and affordability.

Mozambique's infrastructure : a continental perspective

In the last 10 years, Mozambiques economy has grown steadily at an impressive rate of 7.7 percent per year, driven by the service sector, light industry, and agriculture. This pace is expected to continue or even increase with the massive influx of already-planned investment on the order of

Zimbabwe's infrastructure : a continental perspective

15-20 billion. Mozambiques infrastructure is well developed in some sectors, including its east-west transport infrastructure, power grid, and water and sanitation networks. But the nation still faces critical challenges in these and other areas, including developing north-south transport connections, properly managing the water system, and expanding hydroelectric generation to meet potential. Mozambique spent about

The Republic of Congo's infrastructure : a continental perspective

664 million per year on infrastructure during the late 2000s, with as much as

Mali's infrastructure : a continental perspective

204 million lost annually to inefficiencies. Comparing spending needs with existing spending and potential efficiency gains leaves an annual funding gap of

Cape Verde's infrastructure : a continental perspective

822 million per year. Mozambique could reduce inefficiency losses by positioning itself as a key power exporter. The country could reach infrastructure targets in 20 years through a combination of increased finance, improved efficiency, and cost-reducing innovations.

Senegal's infrastructure : a continental perspective

Despite general economic decline and power-supply deficiencies, infrastructure made a modest net contribution of just less than half a percentage point to Zimbabwes improved per capita growth performance in recent years. Raising the countrys infrastructure endowment to that of the regions middle-income countries could boost annual growth by about 2.4 percentage points. Zimbabwe made significant progress in infrastructure in its early period as an independent state, building a national electricity network with regional interconnections, an extensive and internationally connected road network, and a water and sewer system. But the country has been unable to maintain its existing infrastructure since it became immersed in economic and political turmoil in the late 1990s. Zimbabwe now faces a number of important infrastructure challenges, the most pressing of which lie in the power and water sectors, where deteriorating conditions pose risks to the economy and public health. Zimbabwe currently spends about

Sudan's infrastructure : a continental perspective

0.8 billion per year on infrastructure, though

Benchmarking Container Port Technical Efficiency in Latin America and the Caribbean: A Stochastic Frontier Analysis

0.7 billion of this is lost to inefficiencies of various kinds. Even if these inefficiencies were fully captured, Zimbabwe would still face an infrastructure funding gap of