Suchergebnisse

Traditional infrastructure regulation–the law of regulated industries–rests atop three pillars: rate regulation, entry restriction, and universal service. This mode of regulation has typically been applied to providers of network-type resources: resources that are optimally supplied as integrated systems. The monetary system is such a resource; and money creation is the distinctive function of banks. Bank regulation can therefore be understood as a subfield of infrastructure regulation. With few exceptions, modern academic treatments of banking have emphasizes banks' intermediation function and downplayed or ignored their monetary function. Concomitantly, in recent decades U.S. bank regulation has strayed from its infrastructural roots. This regulatory drift has been unwise.

A comprehensive look at the emergence of infrastructure finance. Just as infrastructure development acts as a catalyst for economic growth, it is also changing the landscape for potential investors and the burgeoning field of infrastructure finance. Infrastructure systems for transportation, utilities, and public works are essential for economic growth and have quickly developed into an emerging alternative asset class. Infrastructure Finance examines how the activities associated with updating and creating efficient transportation and communications, reliable and affordable energy, clean wate.

Infrastructures are facilities and services that support the functioning of human societies. Examples are utility networks (such as water, wastewater, gas, electricity, and communications), transportation systems (such as airports, railroads, roads, and bridges), public buildings (municipal buildings and hospitals), and social venues (such as sports and entertainment facilities). Capital intensity, network complexity, and criticality of services provided are among the main attributes of infrastructure systems. Infrastructure management is emerging as a top global priority in the 21st century d

A recent report from the UN makes the case for "global data literacy" in order to realise the opportunities afforded by the "data revolution". Here and in many other contexts, data literacy is characterised in terms of a combination of numerical, statistical and technical capacities. In this article, we argue for an expansion of the concept to include not just competencies in reading and working with datasets but also the ability to account for, intervene around and participate in the wider socio-technical infrastructures through which data is created, stored and analysed – which we call "data infrastructure literacy". We illustrate this notion with examples of "inventive data practice" from previous and ongoing research on open data, online platforms, data journalism and data activism. Drawing on these perspectives, we argue that data literacy initiatives might cultivate sensibilities not only for data science but also for data sociology, data politics as well as wider public engagement with digital data infrastructures. The proposed notion of data infrastructure literacy is intended to make space for collective inquiry, experimentation, imagination and intervention around data in educational programmes and beyond, including how data infrastructures can be challenged, contested, reshaped and repurposed to align with interests and publics other than those originally intended.

Infrastructure has grown rapidly as an alternative asset class, yet many of the complex processes that transform public infrastructures into lucrative financial assets are poorly understood. This article examines investments by an infrastructure debt fund, to show how financial innovations expand and diversify the infrastructure asset class by finding new ways to generate financial returns from infrastructures. Infrastructure debt is an emerging sector of the infrastructure asset class, where private debt funds create assets that generate returns by extending loans or bond financing to physical infrastructures. The analysis uses assetization as a conceptual framework to scrutinise the construction of financial assets, centring the role of rent generation and extraction to show how infrastructure debt funds create financial value. By bringing the performative work of asset construction into dialogue with the political-economic forces enabling rent extraction, the analysis augments existing literature on financialized infrastructures. The findings show how infrastructure debt assets are predicated on multiple rounds of assetization: initially, the essential nature of infrastructure services is exploited to generate and extract monopoly rents as long-term revenue streams, and in turn, debt funds extend claims on these revenue streams to extract rents through interest payments. In this way, infrastructure debt extends the infrastructure asset class and provides a new route to extract rents, raising concerns over the potential of these investment practices to contribute to inclusive regional development and just transitions to mitigate and adapt to climate change.