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Cover -- Half Title -- Title -- Copyright -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Key Messages -- About the Contributors -- Abbreviations -- Overview -- Key Messages -- Introduction -- How Much New Infrastructure Is Needed? -- Scenario Approaches Allow for Informed Policy Making -- Operations and Maintenance Play a Major Role in Costs -- In Sum -- Notes -- References -- 1 Making Infrastructure Needs Assessments Useful and Relevant -- Key Messages -- Introduction -- Why Is Estimating Infrastructure Needs So Difficult? -- A Framework to Make Infrastructure Investment Needs Assessments Useful -- In Sum -- Notes -- References -- 2 Water, Sanitation, and Irrigation -- Key Messages -- Introduction -- Water and Sanitation: MDG or SDG Makes All the Difference -- Irrigation: A Question of How Much to Expand -- In Sum -- Notes -- References -- 3 Power -- Key Messages -- Introduction -- Universal Access Costs Are Driven by Policy Choices regarding the Strategy to Increase Access -- Factoring Climate Change into Investment Needs Estimates -- South America: Bringing Climate and Demand Constraints Together -- In Sum -- Notes -- References -- 4 Transport -- Key Messages -- Introduction -- Rural Accessibility -- Urban Transport -- Global Transport Needs -- In Sum -- Annex 4A: Transport Investment Can Have Positive Impacts on Welfare but Hide Negative Impacts for Some Actors and for the Environment -- Notes -- References -- 5 Flood Protection -- Key Messages -- Introduction -- Costing Coastal and River Flood Protection Strategies -- Future Investment Costs Depend on Construction Costs and Risk Aversion -- How Different Regions Fare Depends on the Protection Strategy -- Protection Strategies Should Budget for Long-Term Maintenance Expenses -- In Sum -- Notes -- References -- 6 Infrastructure and Disruptive Technologies -- Key Messages -- Introduction

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.

National audience ; The question of infrastructure needs is a crucial policy one in Latin America, given evidence of large access shortfalls across all major types of infrastructure, and the increase in demand linked to the rapid growth in households' income over the past two decades. However, how much and how fast countries should invest in each of the main infrastructure areas are largely speculative, as to date, literature on investment needs has relied exclusively on aggregate data and cross-country regressions, ignoring both potential policy and supply-side differences across settings, and variations in demand along the income distribution. This paper addresses these shortcomings, providing building blocks to better assess infrastructure investment needs across the region. It does so documenting access to services and ownership of infrastructure-related durables in the water, energy, telecom, and transport areas, based on harmonized household survey data covering 1.6 million households in 14 Latin American countries from 1992 to –2012. It provides a systematic disaggregation of access and ownership rates at different levels of income and over time, and econometrically derives the country infrastructure premium, a measure of how much a household benefits from simply being located in a given country. Within countries, the results show extensive inequality of access across the income distribution, but this is also the case for households at similar levels of income across countries. Few country fundamentals appear to be significant in explaining this variability, pointing to differences in policy choices and local constraints as important determinants. The paper derives disaggregated income elasticity measures for the full set of infrastructure indicators and uses these to estimate the time that would be needed to close the remaining gap for households at different levels of the income distribution in each country under a "business as usual" hypothesis. Under that scenario, universal access appears to still be ...

This paper provides an overview of the major current debates on infrastructure policy. It reviews the evidence on the macroeconomic significance of the sector in terms of growth and poverty alleviation. It also discusses the major institutional debates, including the relative comparative advantage of the public and the private sector in the various stages of infrastructure service delivery as well as the main options for changes in the role of government (i.e. regulation and decentralization).

AbstractBecause their assets and income represent such a small share of national wealth, the impacts of climate change on poor people, even if dramatic, will be largely invisible in aggregate economic statistics such as the Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Assessing and managing future impacts of climate change on poverty requires different metrics, and specific studies focusing on the vulnerability of poor people. This special issue provides a set of such studies, looking at the exposure and vulnerability of people living in poverty to shocks and stressors that are expected to increase in frequency or intensity due to climate change, such as floods, droughts, heat waves, and impacts on agricultural production and ecosystem services. This introduction summarizes their approach and findings, which support the idea that the link between poverty and climate vulnerability goes both ways: poverty is one major driver of people's vulnerability to climate-related shocks and stressors, and this vulnerability is keeping people in poverty. The paper concludes by identifying priorities for future research.