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The authors analyze the determinants of firm productivity in a group of Mexican firms. In particular, they test the contribution of external factors such as trade and knowledge diffusion, the availability of infrastructure, informal knowledge exchange, competitive environment, and business regulatory climate. The authors find that one factor consistently emerges as an important proximate source of productivity-access to informal networks. Interaction in the form of "business lunches" with local buyers and suppliers, competitors, government officials, and other professionals have a significant and positive effect on a firm's productivity. Access to regulators and agents of backward and forward linkages are important in settings where information on business practices and regulations is not publicly disclosed. The results complement predictions of traditional growth theory-in addition to technology and learning being the driving force of firm productivity, proximity to influential individuals who can grant favors or provide information advantage on business and trade practices have significant productivity impacts.
Based on the hit BBC 5Live podcast series, The Trillion Dollar Conman is an audacious tale of an international fraud that is stranger than fiction . In 2009, Notts County FC were on the brink of bankruptcy when they were taken over by a mysterious company supposedly backed by the Bahraini royal family. The club was promised millions of pounds worth of investment and a list of marquee players, including Sol Campbell and Kasper Schmeichel were signed, in a recruitment drive led by former England manager Sven-Göran Eriksson, who was appointed to take the club all the way to the Premier League. However, within weeks, as the bills began to pile up, the dream came tumbling down as it transpired that the club, the players and the fans had been tricked by a convicted fraudster called Russell King. The world's oldest professional football club found itself at the centre of one of the most outlandish frauds in sporting and world history, which spanned the globe from Nottingham to North Korea, involving fake sheikhs, fast cars, broken promises and a trail of destruction.
Africa's Water and Sanitation InfrastructureùAccess, Affordability, and Alternatives integrates a wealth of primary and secondary information to present a quantitative snapshot of the state of the WSS sectors in Africa. It explains the sectoral institutional structures and utility performance and articulates the volume and quality of financing available over time. The authors also evaluate the challenges to the WSS sectors and explore the factors that govern the expansion of coverage over time. Finally, the authors estimate spending needs for WSS, arriving at a funding gap for meeting the MDGs. The proposed directions for the future draw on lessons learned from best practices and present the menu of choices available to African countries, bearing in mind that the challenges differ to a significant extent among countries and solutions must be tailored to national or regional conditions. --Book Jacket.
Sustainable infrastructure development is vital for Africa s prosperity. And now is the time to begin the transformation. This volume is the culmination of an unprecedented effort to document, analyze, and interpret the full extent of the challenge in developing Sub-Saharan Africa s infrastructure sectors. As a result, it represents the most comprehensive reference currently available on infrastructure in the region. The book covers the five main economic infrastructure sectors information and communication technology, irrigation, power, transport, and water and sanitation. 'Africa s Infrastructure: A Time for Transformation' reflects the collaboration of a wide array of African regional ins...
An account of the Flint water crisis shows that Flint's struggle for safe and affordable water is part of a broader struggle for democracy. When Flint, Michigan, changed its source of municipal water from Lake Huron to the Flint River, Flint residents were repeatedly assured that the water was of the highest quality. At the switchover ceremony, the mayor and other officials performed a celebratory toast, declaring “Here's to Flint!” and downing glasses of freshly treated water. But as we now know, the water coming out of residents' taps harbored a variety of contaminants, including high levels of lead. In Flint Fights Back, Benjamin Pauli examines the water crisis and the political activ...
Most discussions of the digital divide treat it as a "North-South" issue, but the conventional dichotomy doesn't apply to cell phones in Sub-Saharan Africa. Although almost all Sub-Saharan countries are poor by international standards, they exhibit great disparities in coverage by cell telephone systems. Buys, Dasgupta, Thomas and Wheeler investigate the determinants of these disparities with a spatially-disaggregated model that employs locational information for cell-phone towers across over 990,000 4.6-km grid squares in Sub-Saharan Africa. Using probit techniques, a probability model with adjustments for spatial autocorrelation has been estimated that relates the likelihood of cell-tower ...
This engaging interdisciplinary study integrates the deep histories of infectious intestinal disease transmission, the sanitation revolution, and biomedical interventions.
Poorly implemented energy subsidies are economically costly to taxpayers and damage the environment. This book aims to provide lessons from a sample of twenty case studies to help policymakers address implementation challenges and overcome political economy and affordability constraints.
This comprehensive book brings together research published during 2021 analysing the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on the economy – on output and employment, on inequality, and on public policy responses. The Covid-19 pandemic has been the greatest public health crisis for a century – since the ‘Spanish Flu’ pandemic of 1919. The economic impact has been equally seismic. While it is too early to measure the full economic cost – since much of this will continue to accumulate for some time to come – it will certainly be one of the greatest global economic shocks of the past century. Some chapters in this edited volume report on specific countries, while some take a comparative lo...
This book is an analysis of energy and food subsidies in the MENA region between 2010 and 2014. Using the World Bank’s proprietary SUBSIM model, the book studies the distribution of subsidies and the simulation of subsidy reforms across eight countries within in a partial equilibrium framework. The distributional analysis of subsidies provides information on who benefits from existing subsidies, while the simulations of subsidy reforms provide information on the outcomes of the reforms in terms of government budget, household welfare, poverty, inequality, and the trade-offs between these outcomes. This focus provides governments with the essential information they need to make decisions on...