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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 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.

If the South Asia region hopes to meet its development goals and not risk slowing down or even halting growth, poverty alleviation, and shared prosperity, it is essential to make closing its huge infrastructure gap a priority. Identifying and addressing gaps in the data on expenditure, access, and quality are crucial to ensuring that governments make efficient, practical, and effective infrastructure development choices. This study addresses this knowledge gap by focusing on the current status of infrastructure sectors and geographical disparities, real levels of investment and private sector participation, deficits and proper targets for the future, and bottlenecks to expansion. The findings show that the South Asia region needs to invest between US$1.7 trillion and US$2.5 trillion (at current prices) to close its infrastructure gap. If investments are spread evenly over the years until 2020, the region needs to invest between 6.6 and 9.9 percent of 2010 gross domestic product per year, an estimated increase of up to 3 percentage points from the 6.9 percent of gross domestic product invested in infrastructure by countries in the region in 2009. Given the enormous size of the region's infrastructure deficiencies, it will need a mix of investment in infrastructure stock and supportive reforms to close its infrastructure gap. One major challenge will be prioritizing investment needs. Another will be choosing optimal forms of service provision, including the private sector's role, and the decentralization of administrative functions and powers.

This paper investigates private supply of two congestible infrastructures that are serial, where the consumer has to use both in order to consume. Four market structures are analysed: a monopoly and 3 duopolies that differ in how firms interact. It is well known that private supply leads too high usage fees, and that a serial duopoly leads to even higher fees than a monopoly, as firms are monopolists on their sections. But, as this paper finds, a duopoly can also lead to a different capacity rule than the first-best one, and this distortion differs from with two parallel facilities. Finally, four auction formats for the right to build and operate facilities are investigated. With a bid auction, the competition is on how much to pay the government. This auction leads to the same outcome as no auction. An auction on the facility's capacity leads to an even lower welfare than no auction, as firms set overly large high capacities. Conversely, an auction on the generalised price or number of users leads to the first-best outcome, which they do when the facilities go to one or two winners and both with serial as with parallel facilities. © 2013 Elsevier Ltd.

Testimony issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Critical infrastructure protection (CIP) activities that are called for in federal policy and law are intended to enhance the security of the cyber and physical public and private infrastructures that are essential to our nation's security, economic security, and public health and safety. As our reliance on these infrastructures increases, so do the potential threats and attacks that could disrupt critical systems and operations. Effective information-sharing partnerships between industry sectors and government can contribute to CIP efforts. Federal policy has encouraged the voluntary creation of Information Sharing and Analysis Centers (ISACs) to facilitate the private sector's participation in CIP by serving as mechanisms for gathering and analyzing information and sharing it among the infrastructure sectors and between the private sector and government. This testimony discusses the management and operational structures used by ISACs, federal efforts to interact with and support the ISACs, and challenges to and successful practices for ISACs' establishment, operation, and partnerships with the federal government."

Manual of Digital Earth / Editors: Huadong Guo, Michael F. Goodchild, Alessandro Annoni .- Springer, 2020 .- ISBN: 978-981-32-9915-3 ; Geospatial information infrastructures (GIIs) provide the technological, semantic,organizationalandlegalstructurethatallowforthediscovery,sharing,and use of geospatial information (GI). In this chapter, we introduce the overall concept and surrounding notions such as geographic information systems (GIS) and spatial datainfrastructures(SDI).WeoutlinethehistoryofGIIsintermsoftheorganizational andtechnologicaldevelopmentsaswellasthecurrentstate-of-art,andreflectonsome of the central challenges and possible future trajectories. We focus on the tension betweenincreasedneedsforstandardizationandtheever-acceleratingtechnological changes. We conclude that GIIs evolved as a strong underpinning contribution to implementation of the Digital Earth vision. In the future, these infrastructures are challengedtobecomeflexibleandrobustenoughtoabsorbandembracetechnological transformationsandtheaccompanyingsocietalandorganizationalimplications.With this contribution, we present the reader a comprehensive overview of the field and a solid basis for reflections about future developments.

Testimony issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "Physical infrastructure is critical to the nation's economy and affects the daily life of virtually all Americans--from facilitating the movement of goods and people within and beyond U.S. borders to providing clean drinking water. However, this infrastructure--including aviation, highway, transit, rail, water, and dam infrastructure--is under strain. Estimates to repair, replace, or upgrade aging infrastructure as well as expand capacity to meet increased demand top hundreds of billions of dollars. Calls for increased investment in infrastructure come at a time when traditional funding for infrastructure projects is increasingly strained, and the federal government's fiscal outlook is worse than many may understand. This testimony discusses (1) challenges associated with the nation's surface transportation, aviation, water, and dam infrastructure, and the principles GAO has identified to help guide efforts to address these challenges and (2) existing and proposed options to fund investments in the nation's infrastructure. This statement is primarily based on a body of work GAO has completed for the Congress over the last several years. To supplement this existing work, GAO also interviewed Department of Transportation officials to obtain up-to-date information on the status of the Highway Trust Fund and various funding and financing options and reviewed published literature to obtain information on dam infrastructure issues."

Studies linking infrastructure and development support the idea that there are large returns to infrastructure investments. This paper examines the conceptual bases for infrastructure's role and their implementation in the Philippines. Regressions show that capital stock investments have yielded insignificant effects on Philippine output from 1955-2001. A survey of different sectors suggests that poor government management has severely limited the effectiveness of resource mobilization and reduced the rate of return on infrastructure investments in the country. Recent experience indicates that allowing greater private sector involvement may address pressing issues regarding efficiency in provision and funding capabilities until the government develops the ability for effective resource mobilization. It is recommended that the government focus on strengthening future financing capacity to meet expected increases in demand for infrastructure services. Caution, however, must be exercised in the overly liberal provision of performance guarantees as this may lead to significant government expenditure increases in the future.

Making Cultural Infrastructure starts from an argument that artistic cultures are produced in different modes, impacted in distinct ways by the conditions created by the city. Typologies, networks, economies and infrastructural conditions of urban space create sets of possibilities and constraints that affect the way artists work, and thus the kind of public cultural realm that the city can support. To examine this argument, the report is divided into three sections: Inhabiting Cultural Infrastructure; Designing Cultural Infrastructure; and Conceptualising Cultural Infrastructure. Inhabiting Cultural Infrastructure investigates three distinct realms of artistic and cultural production: performative, material, and virtual. The research brought together three workshops each convening a set of practitioners defined primarily by one of these modes of work. The focus was on the spatial or infrastructural settings in which the labour of production and development itself takes place, though evidently public-facing institutions featured as far as they are elements in shaping the experience of this labour, and a public language of value. Three sets of conditions affecting the use of production spaces are identified. Firstly, the importance of the immediate architectural qualities of spaces for artistic production. By this we mean whether spaces are visible or audible to or from the public realm; the degree to which spaces can be made messy and inhabited with a personal archive from which to work; and, if in these spaces people work alongside or separate from one another. These kinds of qualities are described as the material conditions of cultural infrastructure, and often remain invisible in city-wide strategies that guide the geographical conditions of new production spaces through distributional planning. Material conditions of artistic production spaces are key to the kind of work they can support, and could hypothetically be guided through planning conditions for cultural infrastructure. Secondly, attention was drawn to the conditions around spaces for artistic production. Conditions such as whether their immediate urban environments are noisy and messy or quiet and sanitised; the density and typology of other nearby commercial and cultural activities; and how they relate to other infrastructures such as housing or transport. These are described as ecological conditions, relating to the way cultural production is understood to be part of and reliant on a network of flows of materials, people, and activities in the city. Finally, the issue was raised of thinking about the way ideals and regulations are applied to spaces for cultural production, in terms of labour protections or minimum pay. The shaping of these immaterial conditions relate to the role applied to cultural production at a societal level: whether it is seen as a professional or an amateur activity, for example. Together,nthe workshops demonstrated the necessity to think about the relationships between these sets of conditions when positioning cultural infrastructure as a political and planning priority in the city. Designing Cultural Infrastructure centres on four hypothetical propositions put forward respectively by the architecture practices Assemble, DSDHA, We Made That, and Haworth Tompkins. We challenged each practice to propose a design approach to cultural infrastructure in response to the evidence-based working paper emerging from the workshops. Overwhelmingly, their tactics were to create planning guidelines or strategies that could play out across the city, rather than to focus on specific forms of space or architecture. For example, one proposition suggested a required 10% redundant, unprogrammed space in all new buildings over a certain size. This slack space could allow for multiple kinds of unforeseen cultural production to take place alongside the intended uses of those buildings, which in turn could shape the particular material and ecological conditions created by those uses. We argue that a non-performative cultural urbanism increases the possibility for artistic creation without mobilising its products for the kind of culture-led placemaking that has been associated with some of the destructive aspects of urban regeneration. A Language for Cultural Infrastructure builds a framework from the issues raised in Inhabiting Cultural Infrastructure and responded to in Designing Cultural Infrastructure. It intends to stimulate critical thinking in design and planning strategies supporting cultural production. We argue that conversations around the way infrastructure is provided need a diversified terminology to account for the implications of the social, cultural, and political conditions created by different conditions brought about through design and planning. We propose four broad concepts that contain within them productive tensions. Value refers to whether cultural production is seen as craft or labour. Stability highlights the degree to which infrastructures are temporary or permanent. Determinacy asks whether infrastructures are adapted from found space or purpose-built. Visibility addresses the level of publicness or privacy that cultural production operates within. The way each of these tensions is managed within the provision of cultural infrastructure suggests different design strategies, and has different implications for the kinds of political, economic, and social conditions it creates.

International audience ; Laboratory environments for experimenting on infrastructures are often challenging both technically, politically and economically. The situation is further complicated when the interaction between infrastructures is in focus rather than the behaviours of a singular one. Since ICT often has a key role in experiment management, data gathering and experiment upkeep - controlled experimentation becomes even more difficult when some of the interactions studied are between ICT and another infrastructure. The work described herein concerns design, implementation and lessons learned from the construction of a jointeffort experiment environment for, essentially, experimenting with infrastructures.

International audience ; Laboratory environments for experimenting on infrastructures are often challenging both technically, politically and economically. The situation is further complicated when the interaction between infrastructures is in focus rather than the behaviours of a singular one. Since ICT often has a key role in experiment management, data gathering and experiment upkeep - controlled experimentation becomes even more difficult when some of the interactions studied are between ICT and another infrastructure. The work described herein concerns design, implementation and lessons learned from the construction of a jointeffort experiment environment for, essentially, experimenting with infrastructures.

In this article, financial infrastructures increase the efficiency of the banking sector: they reduce the market power of financial intermediaries (stemming from transaction costs and horizontal spatial differentiation), reduce the cost of capital, increase the number of depositors and the total amount of savings collected by banks. These factors increase the growth rate and may allow countries to escape from a poverty trap. On the other hand, taxation finances these infrastructures and reduces the return on capital after tax. An optimal level of financial infrastructure maximising growth or an aggregate well-being measure is assessed. ; International audience ; In this article, financial infrastructures increase the efficiency of the banking sector: they reduce the market power of financial intermediaries (stemming from transaction costs and horizontal spatial differentiation), reduce the cost of capital, increase the number of depositors and the total amount of savings collected by banks. These factors increase the growth rate and may allow countries to escape from a poverty trap. On the other hand, taxation finances these infrastructures and reduces the return on capital after tax. An optimal level of financial infrastructure maximising growth or an aggregate well-being measure is assessed. ; Dans cet article, les infrastructures financières augmentent l'efficacité du secteur bancaire: elles diminuent le pouvoir de marché des intermédiaires financiers (provenant de coûts de transactions et d'une différentiation spatiale horizontale), elles diminuent le coût du capital, augmentent le nombre de déposants et le montant total de l'épargne collectée par les banques. Ces facteurs augmentent le taux de croissance et peuvent permettre à des pays de sortir d'un piège à pauvreté. En revanche, la fiscalité finance ces infrastructures et diminue la rentabilité après impôt du capital. On évalue un niveau optimal d'infrastructures financières maximisant la croissance ou une mesure du bien-être agrégé.

I estimate the effect that growth in countries' GDP per capita has on the growth rate of infrastructure. In order to extract exogenous variation in GDP per capita growth, I use the growth of the international oil price multiplied with countries' GDP shares of oil net-exports as an instrumental variable. My instrumental variables estimates show that, for both democracies and autocracies, GDP per capita growth has a significant positive effect on infrastructure growth. This effect is significantly smaller in anocracies—so much so that, in anocracies, GDP per capita growth has no significant effect on the growth rate of infrastructure.

Infrastructure is essential for development. This report presents a snapshot of the current condition of developing Asia's infrastructure—defined here as transport, power, telecommunications, and water supply and sanitation. It examines how much the region has been investing in infrastructure and what will likely be needed through 2030. Finally, it analyzes the financial and institutional challenges that will shape future infrastructure investment and development.

The authors believe this free of charge book, Fundamentals of Infrastructure Management, will expand the impact of the material and help improve the practice of infrastructure management. By 'free of charge,' we mean that the material can be freely obtained, but readers should devote time and effort to mastering the material. We have provided problem assignments for various chapters, and we strongly urge readers to undertake the problems as a learning experience. This book grew out of a decade of co-teaching a course entitled 'Infrastructure Management' at Carnegie Mellon University. Our teaching philosophy was to prepare students for work in the field of infrastructure management. We believe that infrastructure management is a professional endeavor and an attractive professional career. The book is co-authored by two accomplished engineers - each representing professional practice, academic research and theoretical evaluation. Their collective strengths are presented throughout the text and serve to support both the practice of infrastructure management and a role for infrastructure management inquiry and search. Importantly, both co-authors have academic research interests (and a number of research publications) on various topics of infrastructure management. That said, the primary audience for this book is expected to be professionals intending to practice infrastructure management, and only secondarily individuals who intend to pursue a career of research in the area. The text draws examples and discusses a wide variety of infrastructure systems, including roadways, telecommunications, power generation, buildings and systems of infrastructure. We have found that some common fundamentals of asset management, analysis tools and informed decision-making are useful for a variety of such systems. Certainly, many infrastructure managers encounter a variety of infrastructure types during their professional careers. Moreover, due to the functional inter-dependencies of different infrastructure systems, it is certainly advantageous for managers of one infrastructure type to understand other types of infrastructure. For example, roadway managers rely upon the power grid for traffic signal operation. The first segment of this book presents fundamental concepts and processes (e.g., the FHWA Asset Management Process), followed by chapters on specific types of infrastructure. In the first segment of the book, we generally use roadways as an example infrastructure application but not exclusively. We have chosen roadways since they are ubiquitous and nearly everyone is familiar with their use (and deterioration!). We are convinced that a life cycle or long-term viewpoint is essential for good infrastructure management. There are always pressures to adopt short term thinking in making investment and management decisions. Political election cycles and short-term stock performance certainly focus attention on immediate priorities or issues. Nevertheless, many infrastructure investments will last for decades or more, and providing good performance over an entire lifetime is critical for good infrastructure management. Even virtual decisions such as the adoption of a particular performance standard for a facility component are likely to have long-term implications. Of course, infrastructure managers may face budget limits or other constraints that preclude long-term optimization. A result is the deferred maintenance and functional obsolescence that exist in many infrastructure systems. However, understanding the effects and implications of these constraints is an important task for infrastructure managers. As a fourth organizational concept, we believe that infrastructure management in a process with multiple objectives (as well as multiple constraints). In particular, infrastructure management should adopt a 'triple bottom line' to consider economic, environmental and social impacts. Again, infrastructure managers may be charged with focusing solely on costs of providing services, but infrastructure certainly has implications for the natural environment and for society. For example, infrastructure management typically involves a large number of workers and affects a large number of users, so social impacts are significant. Throughout this book, we will try to address the impacts of infrastructure decision making with regard to these multiple objectives. Students in our Infrastructure Management course were usually first year graduate students or senior undergraduate students. While most were majoring in engineering disciplines, we also had architects, computer scientists and public policy students successfully complete the course. Indeed, many of our students ended up pursuing a career in some form of infrastructure management, and we are particularly grateful to all our students for their insights, their questions and their feedback on the material. Our course in Infrastructure Management was a full semester with class sessions for 30 to 35 hours over the course of a semester. The order of coverage of material generally followed the order in this book, except that we usually covered one or two infrastructure chapters early in the course to provide context for examples. The course involved class sessions (with a mix of lecture, discussion, videos and in-class exercises), homework assignments and a semester-long group project of the student's choosing. We considered the group project fundamental to a substantive understanding of the concepts expressed in the text. Our textbooks ranged from peer reviewed journal papers to the literal infrastructure "news of the day", and our use of those materials is in part responsible for the framework of this text. We also invited a few practicing infrastructure managers to guest lecture on their own their own activities, problems and successes as practitioners in this sub-discipline. We always included a tour of campus infrastructure, visiting utility tunnels, rooftops, and mechanical rooms – spaces not generally open to students. The text features discussions and materials covering the following infrastructure management related topics: Introduction to Infrastructure Management, Importance of Infrastructure, Goals for Infrastructure Management, Role of Infrastructure Managers, Organizations for Infrastructure Management, Asset Management Process, Inventory, Inspection and Condition Assessment, Deterioration Modeling, Decision Making and Forecasting from Condition Assessment, Regression Models, Markov Deterioration Models, Artificial Neural Network Deterioration Models, Failure Rates and Survival Probabilities, Fault Tree Analysis, Optimization and Decision Making, Performance, Usage, Budget and Cost Functions, Short Run Cost Functions for Infrastructure, Life Cycle Costs, Long Run Investment Decisions and Cost Functions, Decision Analysis and Monte Carlo Simulation for Investment Decisions, Interdependence & Resiliency, Contract and Workflow Management, Commissioning New Facilities, Benchmarking and Best Practices. In addition, the text examines in some detail the following infrastructure systems: Roadway Infrastructure, Building Infrastructure, Water Infrastructure, Telecommunications Infrastructure, Electricity Power Generation Infrastructure, Base, Campus, Park and Port Infrastructure. This list is certainly not exhaustive, and in fact, the various strategies, techniques and tools expressed in the text can be readily extended to virtually any infrastructure system. The second edition is available at: https://doi.org/10.1184/R1/5334379.v1. The third edition is available at: https://doi.org/10.1184/R1/5334379.v2.