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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 report presents the findings of a first-ever, comprehensive study of how Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) region airports have evolved during a notable period of transition in airport ownership. It is an unbiased, positive analysis of what happened, rather than a normative analysis of what should be done to reform and to attract private sector participation to the airport sector. It takes the first step to respond to the need for more conclusive information about the influence of airport ownership on economic performance. The report centers on the study of three dimensions of performance: productive efficiency, institutional setup for the governance of the sector, and financing. This multifaceted report uses a range of advanced quantitative and qualitative methods to assess the relationship between airport ownership and performance in the LAC region. After a comprehensive overview, chapters 1 and 2 provide the necessary background for the air transport sector and the evolution of private sector participation and investment in airport infrastructure. In chapter 3, questionnaires submitted to airport operators and regulators led to the creation of the unique data sets, which were first used to compare performance across 14 partial performance indicators, and next used to develop aggregate measures of efficiency necessary for the benchmarking exercise. In chapter 4, a qualitative study of the relationship between type of regulating agency (independent or government-led) and transparency, accountability, and bureaucracy provides insight into how recent reforms have also affected the quality of regulatory governance. Chapter 5 provides an in-depth analysis of the evolution of tariff structures in the region as compared to a sample of international airports. Several important topics were not included in this report but should be the focus of future research. In particular, the evolution of the quality of services in airports deserves greater attention, as airports are increasingly becoming business centers and key gateways for trade competitiveness. The other main topic that requires detailed practical research is climate change and its relationship with the airport sector.

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.

Many low-income countries and development organizations are calling for greater liberalization of labor immigration policies in high-income countries. At the same time, human rights organizations and migrant rights advocates demand more equal rights for migrant workers. The Price of Rights shows why you cannot always have both. Examining labor immigration policies in over forty countries, as well as policy drivers in major migrant-receiving and migrant-sending states, Martin Ruhs finds that there are trade-offs in the policies of high-income countries between openness to admitting migrant workers and some of the rights granted to migrants after admission. Insisting on greater equality of rights for migrant workers can come at the price of more restrictive admission policies, especially for lower-skilled workers. Ruhs advocates the liberalization of international labor migration through temporary migration programs that protect a universal set of core rights and account for the interests of nation-states by restricting a few specific rights that create net costs for receiving countries. The Price of Rights analyzes how high-income countries restrict the rights of migrant workers as part of their labor immigration policies and discusses the implications for global debates about regulating labor migration and protecting migrants. It comprehensively looks at the tensions between human rights and citizenship rights, the agency and interests of migrants and states, and the determinants and ethics of labor immigration policy.

The Lower South’s successes at the Constitutional Convention of 1787 contributed to a constitution that prohibited federal interference with the slave trade until 1808, guaranteed fugitive slaves would be returned to their masters, and prevented export tariffs. We explain why the Lower South occasionally succeeded on sectional issues at the convention using a multiple-dimensional model of sincere voting, estimated using a new dataset of delegate votes, multiple imputation, and optimal classification. We argue that mixing sectional issues with powers of the federal government made the Lower South more mainstream and helped it gain support from various Northern delegations. We test this relationship using regression analysis and apply it to two substantive issues where the Lower South succeeded. The result is a largely new account of how slavery became encoded in the Constitution.

Cloud computing is an essential part for individual and corporate users to perform resource intensive computation. During computation, the cost of execution abruptly changes with the dynamic requirements of the users. So, maintaining trade-off between the performance and the cost of computation has become extremely crucial. To resolve this, we have designed a dynamic pricing model for the IaaS cloud platforms that can set a lower bound of the base price for a cloud service and then compute the variable cost of execution based on the change in the user requirements. We have addressed an efficient mathematical cost analysis model considering all possible static and dynamic cost factors for computing a rational execution cost. Furthermore, we have presented a novel algorithm and implemented it within a simulated proposed service architecture for validating the results. We have compared our proposed model with existing models through extensive simulations.

Large and growing subsidies to residential consumers in Mexico have become a major policy concern. This report explains the growth of subsidies, the current distribution of subsidies across income classes, and uses utility and household survey data to simulate how alternative subsidy mechanisms could improve distributional and fiscal performance. The goal is to help inform discussion in Mexico about how to reduce subsidies and redirect them toward the poor. The findings also offer lessons for other countries that are planning tariff reforms in their electricity sectors.