Consultation on changes to the academic infrastructure

"Th[e consultation] document sets out the proposals of the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education (QAA) for restructuring the Academic Infrastructure to address the findings of an evaluation completed in summer 2010. Overall, the results of the evaluation showed that the Academic Infrastructure has served the higher education sector well, with much evidence of the positive impact it has had on assuring the standards and quality of higher education provision in the UK. However, there are also areas where further improvement would be welcome..." - Page 1. "Th[e] supporting document sets out the evidence on which the proposed changes to the Academic Infrastructure are based. It describes in detail how the findings of the evaluation have been addressed." - Page 1

Infrastructure, market access, and agricultural prices

The effect of recent agricultural market reforms in many developing countries is often measured through tests for market integration by analyzing co-variation of food prices. However, market integration studies often fail to link the discovery of the lack of integration to causal factors. This analysis documents and relates price variation to structural determinants in the case of Madagascar. The spatial variability between communities is linked to the distance to a paved road, the quality of the road, access to soft infrastructure, and the level of competition between traders. Differences in seasonal variation are mainly related to the differential opportunity costs of capital in rice villages and to hard infrastructure in non-rice villages. Communities that lack basic infrastructure show lower prices during the harvest season and higher seasonal gaps. Moreover, it is shown that road distance matters more than road quality during the harvest period as there is no strong relationship between road quality and the producer price decline per unit of time. While the presence of roads shows up in relatively higher producer prices, it does not automatically lead to more competition among traders. Hence, investment in hard infrastructure is not sufficient to successfully increase market access. However, soft infrastructure on top of hard infrastructure seems beneficial for increased producer prices, reduced price variability, and improved market integration.Markets Prices. ,Price regulation. ,Infrastructure (Economics) ,

Effects of improving infrastructure quality on business costs : evidence from firm-level data

Economic development is affected by infrastructure services in both volume and quality terms. However, the quality of infrastructure is relatively difficult to measure and assess. The current paper, using firm-level data collected by a business environment assessment survey in 26 countries in Europe and Central Asia, estimates the marginal impacts on firm costs of infrastructure quality. The results suggest that the reliability or continuity of services is important for business performance. Firm costs significantly increase when electricity outages occur more frequently and theaverage outage duration becomes longer. Similarly, increased hours of water supply suspensions also reduce firms'competitiveness. In these countries, it is found that the total benefit for the economy from eliminating the existing electricity outages ranges from 0.5 to 6 percent of gross domestic product. If all water suspensions are removed, the economy could receive a gain of about 0.5 to 2 percent of gross domestic product. By contrast, the quality of telecommunications services seems to have no significant impact.Transport Economics Policy&Planning,Town Water Supply and Sanitation,Private Participation in Infrastructure,Infrastructure Economics,Urban Slums Upgrading

Infrastructure, Competition Regimes and Air Transport Costs: Cross Country Evidence

The relevance of transport costs has increased as liberalization continues to reduce artificial barriers to trade. Countries need to adopt policies to “get closer†to global markets. Can improvements in infrastructure and regulation reduce transport costs? Is it worthwhile to implement policies designed to increase competition in transport markets? Focusing on air transport, which has increased its share in US imports from 24% in 1990 to 35% in 2000, this paper quantifies the effects of infrastructure, regulatory quality and liberalization of air cargo markets on transport costs. During the 1990s, the US implemented a series of Open Skies Agreements, providing a unique opportunity to assess the effect that a change in the competition regime has on prices. We find that infrastructure, quality of regulation and competition matter. In our sample, an improvement in airport infrastructure from the 25th to 75th percentiles reduces air transport costs 15 percent. A similar improvement in the quality of regulation reduces air transport costs 14 percent. Besides, Open Skies Agreements further reduces air transport costs 8 percent: Infrastructure, Transport costs, air transport liberalization, regulatory quality

Institutions for Asian Connectivity

To make Asia more economically sustainable and resilient against external shocks, regional economies need to be rebalanced toward regional demand- and trade-driven growth through increased regional connectivity. The effectiveness of connectivity depends on the quality of hard and soft infrastructure. Of particular importance in terms of soft infrastructure which makes hard infrastructure work are the facilitating institutions that support connectivity through appropriate policies, reforms, systems, and procedures and through promoting effective coordination and cooperation. Asia has many overlapping subregional institutions involved in national and regional energy, transport, and telecommunications infrastructure connectivity. However, these institutions are characterized as being less effective, informal, and lacking a clear and binding system of rules and policies. This paper draws linkages between connectivity, growth and development, governance, and institutions. It details the benefits the region could achieve by addressing needed connectivity enhancements and the connectivity and financing challenges it faces. In addition, it presents various institutional options for regional infrastructure financing. To build seamless Asian connectivity, Asia needs an effective, formal, and rules-based institutional framework. The paper presents a new institutional framework together with the organizational structures of two new regional institutional mechanisms, namely the Pan-Asian Infrastructure Forum and the Asian Infrastructure Fund.asian infrastructure financing; asian infrastructure connectivity; asian institutions

The effect of infrastructure access and quality on non-farm enterprises in rural Indonesia

There is growing interest in the rural non-farm sector in developing countries as a contributor to economic growth, employment generation, livelihood diversification and poverty reduction. Access to infrastructure is identified in some studies as a factor that affects nonfarm rural employment and income but less attention has been paid to the constraints imposed by poor quality infrastructure. In this paper we use data from 4000 households in rural Indonesia to show that the quality of two key types of infrastructure – roads and electricity – affects both employment in and income from non-farm enterprises. It appears that there would be gains from development strategies that improve both the access to and the quality of rural infrastructure

Critical Factors of Information Technology Infrastructure Quality for Enhancing Environmental Competencies of the Indonesian Organizations

Information Technology (IT) can be adopted as a capability of organizations to improve its environmental performance. The purpose of this research is to develop IT infrastructure quality model and its environmental competencies of IT in order to improve its environmental performance. The model is developed based on the resource-based view as theoretical foundation and related literature including green IT. The validity of the model is tested using structural equation modelling based on data collected from the Indonesian ICT industry. Findings show that the IT infrastructure quality is critical abilities of an organisation used for developing environmental competencies of IT. It also indicates that the environmental competencies of organisations are positively associated with IT infrastructure quality. A new model of IT infrastructure quality constitutes an original contribution to the information system literature especially in an area the relationship between IT infrastructure quality and environmental performance

Short-run stick and long-run carrot policy: the role of initial conditions

This paper explores the dynamic properties of price-based policies in a model of competition between two jurisdictions. Jurisdictions invest over time in infrastructure to increase the quality of the environment, a global public good. They are identical in all respects but one: initial stocks of infrastructure. This is a dynamic type of heterogeneity that disappears in the long run. Therefore, at the steady state, usual intuitions from static settings apply: identical jurisdictions inefficiently under-invest, calling for public subsidies. In the short run, however, counterintuitive properties are established: i) the evolution of capital stocks can be non-monotonic, ii) one jurisdiction can be temporarily taxed, even though it should increase its investment, whereas the other is subsidized. It is shown how these phenomena are related to initial conditions and the kind of interactions between infrastructure capitals, complementarity or substitutability.

Rural small firms' website quality in transition and market economies

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate website quality in rural firms in four countries, by using Gonzalez and Palacios's Web Assessment Index (WAI). There is an assertion in the literature that quality is lower amongst rural firms than urban firms, and lower amongst small firms than large firms. The disadvantages of lack of access to skills and economic peripherality in rural areas are attributed to this. Concurrently, there is reason to surmise that the websites of firms in transition economies may be higher quality than those in market economies. The paper aims to explore websites in distinct rural regions to investigate if variation occurs. Design/methodology/approach – To evaluate website quality the WAI was applied to a sample of 60 rural firms representing 15 each in Scotland, New Zealand, Southern Russia and Hunan Province in China. Analysis of the categorical data was performed using a variety of established methods. Findings – The WAI is of use in terms of website quality management. Additionally, comparisons between the quality of websites in the sample of small rural firms with those of large firms in previous studies support the contention that large firms generally have better quality websites. Results also illustrate that there are some differences in website quality between rural small businesses in the different locations. In particular, small rural firms in Hunan Province in China had websites of observable better quality than those elsewhere. The authors conclude that skills, knowledge and infrastructure have a bearing on the sophistication of small firms' websites. Research limitations/implications – Implications include that variation in the rural economy by region prevails as the rural economy is not, as often implied, a homogeneous concept. Practical implications – There are implications in terms of exploring the effects of regulation, culture and infrastructure on rural small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). The internet may indeed contribute to rural economies, but only insofar as it is facilitated by infrastructure and access to skills, and by culture and perceived usefulness by business owners. Originality/value – The paper contributes to the understanding of rural entrepreneurship as a heterogeneous concept by comparing practice in four distinct rural regions. It also adds weight to the emerging identification of exogenous factors as being at least as much a factor in determining the use of ICT in rural SMEs as endogenous motivations, skills and resources. </jats:sec

Optimizing the Structure and Scale of Urban Water Infrastructure: Integrating Distributed Systems

Large-scale, centralized water infrastructure has provided clean drinking water, wastewater treatment, stormwater management and flood protection for U.S. cities and towns for many decades, protecting public health, safety and environmental quality. To accommodate increasing demands driven by population growth and industrial needs, municipalities and utilities have typically expanded centralized water systems with longer distribution and collection networks. This approach achieves financial and institutional economies of scale and allows for centralized management. It comes with tradeoffs, however, including higher energy demands for longdistance transport; extensive maintenance needs; and disruption of the hydrologic cycle, including the large-scale transfer of freshwater resources to estuarine and saline environments.While smaller-scale distributed water infrastructure has been available for quite some time, it has yet to be widely adopted in urban areas of the United States. However, interest in rethinking how to best meet our water and sanitation needs has been building. Recent technological developments and concerns about sustainability and community resilience have prompted experts to view distributed systems as complementary to centralized infrastructure, and in some situations the preferred alternative.In March 2014, the Johnson Foundation at Wingspread partnered with the Water Environment Federation and the Patel College of Global Sustainability at the University of South Florida to convene a diverse group of experts to examine the potential for distributed water infrastructure systems to be integrated with or substituted for more traditional water infrastructure, with a focus on right-sizing the structure and scale of systems and services to optimize water, energy and sanitation management while achieving long-term sustainability and resilience