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232. Sustainable Water Systems: Step One - Redefining the Nation's Infrastructure Challenge
- Author:
- David Monsma, Regan Nelson, and Ray Bolger
- Publication Date:
- 05-2009
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Aspen Institute
- Abstract:
- During the past 150 years, a complex water infrastructure has been built throughout the U.S. to supply homes and businesses with clean water, collect and treat wastewater and manage stormwater – and an equally complex regulatory system has evolved alongside it. A generation of progress has been made under the Clean Water Act and the Safe Drinking Water Act. However, serious challenges still exist for the nation's freshwater resources, including insufficient progress in achieving water quality goals, overuse of water resources, and looming challenges associated with global climate change, including droughts, heavy storm events and flooding. Meanwhile, water and wastewater utilities are struggling with aged infrastructure that requires upgrades or replacement. Control of urban storm water and rural runoff will require large new investments. Appropriate sources of funding and affordability of these investments also requires attention.
- Topic:
- Natural Resources, Water, and Infrastructure
- Political Geography:
- United States
233. The Environmental Impacts of Soybean Expansion And Infrastructure Development in Brazil's Amazon Basin
- Author:
- Maria del Carmen Vera-Diaz, Robert K. Kaufmann, and Daniel C. Nepstad
- Publication Date:
- 05-2009
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Global Development and Environment Institute at Tufts University
- Abstract:
- For decades, the development of transportation infrastructure in the Brazilian Amazon has been the government's main social and economic development policy in the region. Reductions in transportation costs have not only opened the agricultural frontier to cattle ranching and logging but have also caused more than two-thirds of Amazonian deforestation. Currently, soybean cultivation is a new economic force demanding improvements to roads in the region. Profitable soybean crops have spread over the Mato Grosso's cerrados and now head toward the core of the Amazon rain forest. One of the main constraints for soy expansion into the Amazon has been the poor condition of roads. In this study, we analyze the effect Amazon transportation infrastructure programs have on soybean expansion by lowering transport costs. The analysis is based on spatial estimates of transportation costs for the soybean sector, first using current road networks and then projecting changes based on the paving of the Cuiabá-Santarém road. Our results indicate that paving the Cuiabá-Santarém road would reduce transportation costs by an average of $10 per ton for farmers located in the northern part of Mato Grosso, by allowing producers to reroute soybean shipments to the Santarém port. Paving the road also would expand the area where growing soybeans is economically feasible by about 70 percent, from 120,000 to 205,000 km2 . Most of this new area would be located in the state of Pará and is covered largely by forests. A Cost-Benefit analysis of the road project indicates that the investments in infrastructure would generate more than $180 million for soybean farmers over a period of twenty years. These benefits, however, ignore the project's environmental impacts. If the destruction of ecological services and products provided by the existing forests is accounted for, then the Cuiabá-Santarém investment would generate a net loss of between $762 million and $1.9 billion. This result shows the importance of including the value of the natural capital in feasibility studies of infrastructure projects to reflect their real benefits to society as a whole.
- Topic:
- Agriculture, Development, Economics, Environment, and Infrastructure
- Political Geography:
- Brazil, Latin America, and Amazon Basin
234. High-Speed Rail Is Not "Interstate 2.0"
- Author:
- Randal O'Toole
- Publication Date:
- 09-2009
- Content Type:
- Policy Brief
- Institution:
- The Cato Institute
- Abstract:
- The administration has likened President Obama's high-speed rail plan to President Eisenhower's Interstate Highway System. Yet there are crucial differences between interstate highways and high-speed rail. First, before Congress approved the Interstate Highway System, it had a good idea how much it would cost. In contrast, Congress approved $8 billion for high-speed rail without knowing the total cost, which is likely to be at least $90 billion.
- Topic:
- Energy Policy, Government, and Infrastructure
- Political Geography:
- United States
235. The Citizens' Guide to Transportation Reauthorization
- Author:
- Randal O'Toole
- Publication Date:
- 12-2009
- Content Type:
- Policy Brief
- Institution:
- The Cato Institute
- Abstract:
- Sometime in 2010 or 2011, Congress expects to decide how to spend the $250 billion or more of federal gas taxes and other highway user fees that will be collected over the next six years. The process of doing so is called surface transportation reauthorization. A major point of contention in this law is how much of our transportation system should be centrally planned and how much should be built and operated in response to the needs of actual transportation users.
- Topic:
- Economics and Infrastructure
- Political Geography:
- United States
236. Improving infrastructure or lowering taxes to attract foreign direct investment?
- Author:
- Christian Bellak and Markus Leibrecht
- Publication Date:
- 06-2009
- Content Type:
- Policy Brief
- Institution:
- Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment
- Abstract:
- A crucial challenge to all countries in the current economic crisis is to stimulate investment, including foreign direct investment (FDI). Countries striving to attract FDI often resort to two types of policies: improving infrastructure or lowering taxes, as a means of attracting new FDI, or keeping existing FDI. Indeed, recent empirical studies (e.g. Bénassy-Quéré et al. 2007; Bellak et al. 2009) confirmed that both lower taxes and improved infrastructure exert a considerable influence upon multinational enterprises' decision to invest in a particular country, when controlling for other important location factors (like market size, labor costs etc.).
- Topic:
- Economics, Infrastructure, and Foreign Direct Investment
237. Optimisation of Central Asian and Eurasian Trans-Continental Land Transport Corridors
- Author:
- Michael Emerson and Evgeny Vinokurov
- Publication Date:
- 12-2009
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Centre for European Policy Studies
- Abstract:
- There is at present an overlapping but inadequately coordinated combination of strategic trans-continental transport corridors or axes stretching across the Eurasian landmass, centred on or around Central Asia. There are three such initiatives - from the EU, China and the Asian Development Bank, and the Eurasian Economic Community. This paper reviews these several strategic transport maps, and makes proposals for their coordination and rationalisation. So far the EU Central Asia strategy has not paid much attention to these questions. However the EU's own initiatives (the Pan-European Axes and the TRACECA programme) are in need of updating and revision to take into account major investments being made by other parties. In particular the case is made for a 'Central Eurasian Corridor' for rail and road that would reach from Central Europe across Ukraine and Southern Russia into West Kazakhstan, and thence to the East Kazakh border with China, thus joining up with and completing the West China-West Europe corridor promoted by the Asian Development Bank. There should also be a North-South corridor that would cross over this Central Eurasian Corridor in West Kazakhstan and lead south to the Middle East and South Asia. These adaptations of existing plans could become an exemplary case of cooperation between Central Asia and all the major economic powers of the Eurasian landmass.
- Topic:
- International Trade and Finance and Infrastructure
- Political Geography:
- Russia, China, Europe, Central Asia, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan
238. National Single Window: Towards More Efficient Trade And Greater Trade Volumes
- Author:
- Nazery Khalid
- Publication Date:
- 10-2009
- Content Type:
- Policy Brief
- Institution:
- Maritime Institute of Malaysia
- Abstract:
- The implementation of National Single Window (NSW) as an electronic trade platform augurs well with Malaysia\'s intention to provide the infrastructures and processes to facilitate more efficient trade and generate bigger trade volumes. This commentary argues in favour of conducting trade in an online environment using this platform to enhance the efficiency of the trade supply chain and to increase Malaysia\'s trade competitiveness. It also provides several recommendations to ensure smooth and successful implementation of the NSW.
- Topic:
- International Trade and Finance, Maritime Commerce, and Infrastructure
- Political Geography:
- Malaysia and Southeast Asia
239. A Bridge Too Far? An Analysis Of The Proposed Bridge Across The Straits Of Malacca From A Maritime Perspective
- Author:
- Nazery Khalid, Ibrahim Hj Mohamed, and Rakish Suppiah
- Publication Date:
- 10-2009
- Content Type:
- Policy Brief
- Institution:
- Maritime Institute of Malaysia
- Abstract:
- The proposal to build a bridge across the Straits o f Malacca will have significant impacts on the shipping, environment and trade dynamics in the sea lane. This commentary discusses the potential repercussions of this megaproject from th e maritime perspective.
- Topic:
- Development, Environment, International Trade and Finance, Maritime Commerce, and Infrastructure
- Political Geography:
- Southeast Asia
240. Infrastructure, Knowledge Creation and Spillovers and Economic Growth in China
- Author:
- Sangaralingam Ramesh
- Publication Date:
- 03-2009
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- School of Oriental and African Studies - University of London
- Abstract:
- The economic prosperity associated with the Coastal regions of China has not ‘trickled’ down to the Western and Central regions sufficiently enough to eliminate the disparities in income between the regions. Indeed, the disparities between China’s Coastal regions and its other regions continue to deepen to the present day. In the Mao period the Central planners held the mistaken belief that investment in the railways and development of heavy industry in the interior parts of China would bring prosperity. In the reform period and beyond, the focus of economic development in China has been to take advantage of China’s low labour costs. In the earlier part of the reform era the focus of economic reforms centred on the development of Special Economic Zones (SEZ’s) .In the second phase of reform policies were centred on the High Technology Development Zones [NHTIDZ’s].A characteristic feature of both SEZ’s and NHTIDZ’s is that they represent a concentration of infrastructure within a predefined spatial area. The framework of analysis in this paper is the New Economic Geography [NEG] .The NEG addresses the formation of agglomeration economies accruing to physical linkages in one location. However, the NEG does not address the issue of how agglomeration economies form due to knowledge creation linkages which are location independent. The main facet of this approach is that it will allow for a qualitative analysis of the spatial aspects of the infrastructural and knowledge creation factors affecting China’s economic growth. Previous approaches which have been used to study infrastructure and economic growth in China have been based on Econometric techniques. These approaches use measures such as length of railway, length of roads and telephone density, while in reality the concentration of infrastructure in the SEZ’s and NHTIDZ’s as significantly contributed to China’s post 1978 economic growth.
- Topic:
- Infrastructure, Income Inequality, and Economic growth
- Political Geography:
- China and Asia