Decentralized structures for providing roads : a cross-country comparison

Minimizing costs is often cited as essential for optimizing service delivery. Roads are the oldest, most important infrastructure services provided by governments. They require construction, rehabilitation, maintenance, and administration. Various institutional arrangements affect the degree to which costs can be minimized. Drawing on analyses of experiences with decentralized road provision in eight countries, a longitudinal change analysis of Korea, and vertical and horizontal analysis across states and local governments in Germany, the authors found that the impact of decentralization varies depending on which aspect one is considering: the efficiency of producing road services or the impact on road users. Resources costs are concave, increasing first and decreasing at later stages of decentralization. Preference costs are downward sloping, suggesting that road conditions improve as decentralization advances. In short, decentralization entails initial costs, mostly as losses in economies of scale. But those losses can be outweighed by increases in efficiency when the locus of roadwork is closer to the people. The advantages or limitations of decentralization are function-specific: a) maintenance functions are best provided locally; b) to minimize resource costs, construction should be either completely centralized or completely decentralized; and c) administrative activities are more efficiently provided by local units similar to local maintenance units.Decentralization,Municipal Financial Management,Economic Theory&Research,Banks&Banking Reform,National Governance,Economic Theory&Research,Banks&Banking Reform,Municipal Financial Management,Regional Rural Development,National Governance

How Do Households Respond to Unreliable Water Supplies? : A Systematic Review

Although the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) target for drinking water was met, in many developing countries water supplies are unreliable. This paper reviews how households in developing countries cope with unreliable water supplies, including coping costs, the distribution of coping costs across socio-economic groups, and effectiveness of coping strategies in meeting household water needs. Structured searches were conducted in peer-reviewed and grey literature in electronic databases and search engines, and 28 studies were selected for review, out of 1643 potentially relevant references. Studies were included if they reported on strategies to cope with unreliable household water supplies and were based on empirical research in developing countries. Common coping strategies include drilling wells, storing water, and collecting water from alternative sources. The choice of coping strategies is influenced by income, level of education, land tenure and extent of unreliability. The findings of this review highlight that low-income households bear a disproportionate coping burden, as they often engage in coping strategies such as collecting water from alternative sources, which is labour and time-intensive, and yields smaller quantities of water. Such alternative sources may be of lower water quality, and pose health risks. In the absence of dramatic improvements in the reliability of water supplies, a point of critical avenue of enquiry should be what coping strategies are effective and can be readily adopted by low income households

Theory and methods of analyzing infrastructure inspection output : application to highway pavement surface condition evaluation

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Civil Engineering, 1990.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 258-260).by Frannie Frank Humplick.Ph.D

Highway pavement distress evaluation: Modeling measurement error

There has been a proliferation of inspection technologies to quantify distresses on highway pavement systems. These technologies employ varying measurement principles and are subject to measurement errors. Estimates of measurement errors are therefore required in order to select among these techniques, and to get accurate assessments of pavement condition. There is abundant literature concerning techniques available for the numerical study of measurement errors. Available techniques include econometric methods of coping with errors in variables when investigating relationships between variables that have been measured with error; calibration approaches under various measurement conditions; and evaluation of measurement errors due to quantification, by a proxy, of concepts that are not directly measurable or observable. The methodologies employed in these techniques rely on certain assumptions for model development and estimation. These assumptions include the nature of error occurrence, whether systematic or random; the effect of these errors on the measured result, whether multiplicative or additive; and the level of knowledge about the true value of the measured object. Such assumptions may be violated under certain conditions. This paper identifies such situations and develops a generalized measurement error modeling approach, in which existing approaches are special cases. Existing methods are reviewed as to the specification models used to represent measurement errors; the types of errors accounted for in the suggested specification model; the type of errors not accounted for and the biases induced in estimated parameters by ignoring certain error types. The approach developed is capable of quantifying the accuracy of measurement for cases where the true value of the measured object is not known. This is the case in highway pavement distress evaluation as there is no single well-accepted technology which can be used as a proxy for the value for calibration purposes. The methodology developed in this paper explicitly estimates the true value and is applied to the calibration of new technologies for highway distress evaluation.

Does decentralization improve infrastructure performance?

info:eu-repo/semantics/publishe