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It is now well-accepted that infrastructure development is essential for the growth of any economy. Successive governments in India, both at the Union and State level have given a thrust towards increased budgetary spending on infrastructure to help economic growth. On the eve of the 75th year of independence, there is a reiteration for long-term initiatives, including focused programs for roads, railways, airports, waterways, mass transport, ports, and logistics to further boost infrastructure spending. Keeping this in mind, the authors sought to systematically review the literature on how infrastructure development has unfolded in India between the years 2000–2022. The study shows that with diverse economic growth in India, there is interest in infrastructure development aligned with public interests. Infrastructure development is contextual and location-specific. Access to infrastructure positively impacts social and economic outcomes. There is however growing concern for sustainable development with rapid urbanization.

This book reviews Latin America's experience with infrastructure reform over the last fifteen years. It argues that the region's infrastructure has suffered from public retrenchment and unrealistic expectations about private involvement. Poor infrastructure now hampers productivity, growth, and poverty reduction. Addressing this requires more and better spending, and acceptance that governments remain central to infrastructure provision and supervision, although the private sector still has an important role to play.

This study is a product of the Africa Infrastructure Country Diagnostic (AICD), a project designed to expand the world's knowledge of physical infrastructure in Africa. The AICD provides a baseline against which future improvements in infrastructure services can be measured, making it possible to monitor the results achieved from donor support. It also offers a more solid empirical foundation for prioritizing investments and designing policy reforms in the infrastructure sectors in Africa. The book draws upon a number of background papers that were prepared by World Bank staff and consultants, under the auspices of the AICD. The main findings were synthesized in a flagship report titled Africa's infrastructure: A time for transformation, published in November 2009. Meant for policy makers, that report necessarily focused on the high-level conclusions. It attracted widespread media coverage feeding directly into discussions at the 2009 African union commission heads of state summit on infrastructure.

This study aims to examine the influence of macroeconomic indicators and infrastructure spending on foreign direct investment (FDI) in the period 1981 to 2018. This study uses a quantitative approach. The sample in this study is macroeconomic variables, which include gross domestic product, inflation, debt to GDP ratio, interest rates, exchange rates, and infrastructure spending in the 1981 to 2018 period. The analysis technique used is cointegration and error correction modeling. The analysis shows that gross domestic product, inflation, debt to GDP ratio, interest rates, exchange rates, and infrastructure spending have a long-term and short-term relationship to FDI.

Workers' remittances have become a major source of financing for developing countries and are especially important in Latin America and the Caribbean, which is at the top of the ranking of remittance receiving regions in the world. While there has been a recent surge in analytical work on the topic, this book is motivated by the large heterogeneity in migration and remittance patterns across countries and regions, and by the fact that existing evidence for Latin America and the Caribbean is restricted to only a few countries, such as Mexico and El Salvador. Because the nature of the phenomenon varies across countries, its development impact and policy implications are also likely to differ in ways that are still largely unknown. This book helps fill the gap by exploring, in the specific context of Latin America and Caribbean countries, some of the main questions faced by policymakers when trying to respond to increasing remittances flows. The book relies on cross-country panel data and household surveys for 11 Latin American countries to explore the development impact of remittance flows along several dimensions: growth, poverty, inequality, schooling, health, labor supply, financial development, and real exchange rates.

Information and communication technologies (ICTs) have been a remarkable success in Africa. Across the continent, the availability and quality of service have gone up and the cost has gone down. In just 10 years dating from the end of the 1990s mobile network coverage rose from 16 percent to 90 percent of the urban population; by 2009, rural coverage stood at just under 50 percent of the population. Although the performance of Africa's mobile networks over the past decade has been remarkable, the telecommunications sector in the rest of the world has also evolved rapidly. Many countries now regard broadband Internet as central to their long-term economic development strategies, and many companies realize that the use of ICT is the key to maintaining profitability. This book is about that challenge and others. Chapters two and three describe the recent history of the telecommunications market in Africa; they cover such issues as prices, access, the performance of the networks, and the regulatory reforms that have triggered much of the investment. This part of the book compares network performance across the region and tries to explain why some countries have moved so much more quickly than others in providing affordable telecommunications services. Chapter four explores the financial side of the telecommunications revolution in Africa and details how the massive investments have been financed and which companies have most influenced the sector. Chapter five deals with the future of the sector. The final chapter synthesizes the main chapters of the book and presents policy recommendations intended to drive the sector forward.