Update on Land Administration and Policies in Asia/Pacific

Infrastructure improvements boosted
growth in the Economic Community of West African States
(ECOWAS) by one percentage point per capita per year during
1995-2005, primarily thanks to growth in information and
communication technology. Deficient power infrastructure
held growth back by 0.1 percent. Raising the region's
infrastructure to the level of Mauritius could boost growth
by 5 percentage points. Overall, infrastructure in the 15

The importance of transport corridors
for trade and development, including for some of the poorest
countries in the world, is widely recognized in this book. A
new consensus has also emerged that reducing trade costs and
improving access to corridors is not just a matter of
building infrastructure. The policies that regulate
transport services providers and the movement of goods along
corridors are important determinants of the social rate of

This book suggests how that exploration
should be undertaken, and how a monitoring system that has a
solid conceptual basis and is both easy to operate and
reasonable in cost can then be put into practice. Long the
ideal of many scholars and observers of urban problems, such
a system may now be close to realization. In this book,
examples of Latin American cities are used as case studies.
As argued in the first chapter, there are good reasons to

Petroleum products are used across the
entire economy in every country. Gasoline and diesel are the
primary fuels used in road transport. Oil is used in power
generation, accounting for eleven percent of total
electricity generated in Africa in 2007. Adequate and
reliable supply of transport services and electricity in
turn are essential for economic development. Households use
a variety of petroleum products: kerosene is used for

The railways of South East Europe and
Turkey experienced significant declines in traffic volumes
in 2009. This reflected the impact of the international
financial crisis unleashed in the last quarter of 2008 and
its contractionary impact on the economies of the region and
elsewhere. Lower traffic volumes translated in most cases
into a serious deterioration of the financial performance of
the state-owned railways. This brought home the costs of

Sound infrastructure is critical for
growth in East Africa. During 1995-2005, improvements in
infrastructure boosted growth by one percentage point per
year, due largely to wider access to information and
communication technologies (ICTs). Although power
infrastructure sapped growth in other regions of Africa, it
contributed 0.2 percentage points per year growth in East
Africa. If East Africa's infrastructure could be

Infrastructure improvements boosted
growth in the Southern African Development Community (SADC)
by 1.2 percentage points per capita per year during
1995-2005, mainly from access to mobile telephony. Road
network improvements made small growth contributions, while
power sector inadequacy had a negative impact.
Infrastructure improvements that matched those of Mauritius,
the regional leader, could boost regional growth performance

This paper offers an empirical
evaluation of the output contribution of infrastructure.
Drawing from a large data set on infrastructure stocks
covering 88 countries and spanning the years 1960-2000, and
using a panel time-series approach, the paper estimates a
long-run aggregate production function relating GDP to human
capital, physical capital, and a synthetic measure of
infrastructure given by the first principal component of

The purpose of the Public Expenditure
and Financial Accountability (PEFA) assessment is to provide
the Government of Lao PDR (GOL) with a concise,
standardized, objective, indicator-led assessment of the
country's public financial management (PFM) systems to
provide a benchmark against which to measure the further
strengthening of Lao PFM. Partial assessments have been made
in the past. However, this is the first comprehensive

This paper investigates the main factors
explaining long container dwell times in African Ports.
Using original and extensive data on container imports in
the Port of Douala, it seeks to provide a basic
understanding of why containers stay on average more than
two weeks in gateway ports in Africa while long dwell times
are widely recognized as a critical hindrance to economic
development. It also demonstrates the interrelationships

Based on quantitative and qualitative
data, this paper attempts to identify the main reasons why
cargo dwell time in Durban port has dramatically reduced in
the past decade to a current average of 3-4 days. A major
customs reform; changes in port storage tariffs coupled with
strict enforcement; massive investments in infrastructure
and equipment; and changing customer behavior through
contractualization between the port operator and shipping