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Liberia's 14-year civil war left much of the country's infrastructure shambles. The country's 170 megawatt power generation capacity and national grid were completely destroyed. In Monrovia, just 0.1 percent of households had access to electricity. According to the 2008 National Census, access to piped water fell from 15 percent of the population in 1986 to less than 3 percent in 2008. The national road network was left in severe disrepair. Peace brought many positive developments. The Freeport of Monrovia is now privately managed and has resumed normal operations. Essential rehabilitation work has been carried out, and the port's performance now matches that of neighboring ports along the West African coast. Liberia has also successfully liberalized its mobile telephone markets, with access surging to 40 percent in 2009, at some of the lowest prices in Africa. Despite the potential for private investment, Liberia will likely need more than a decade to reach the illustrative infrastructure targets outlined in this report. Under business-as-usual assumptions for spending and efficiency, it would take at least 40 years for Liberia to reach these goals. Yet with a combination of increased finance, improved efficiency, and cost-reducing innovations, it should be possible to significantly reduce that time.

In 2010, the Municipality of Cuenca, through its environmental management commission (EMC), and the World Bank, through the environment and natural resources department, started a collaboration targeted towards strengthening EMC’s capacity to better manage Cuenca’s environmental assets and to provide EMC with hard evidence and data that will serve as departing point for decision-makers towards the formulation of public policy. Two main areas of focus were chosen: (i) costs of environmental degradation for Cuenca; and (ii) climate change impacts and resilience measures for Cuenca. This report describes the findings of the first area of focus. This report tries to capture the main results and to describe the assumptions and input data utilized, through a detailed step-by-step description of an internationally-accepted and validated methodology, an explanation of input data needs, equations used, assumptions made, and alternative calculation streams; and through the demonstration of this methodology as it is applied to the real case of air pollution in Cuenca. Analyses about the cost of environmental degradation are often used as an environmental priority-setting tool, because it gives the estimated socio-economic costs of environmental degradation (air pollution, inadequate water supply, sanitation, hygiene, and others). In this report, the methodology was used only for air pollution; similar studies can be replicated for other areas in order to have a full description of the different sources of pollution and the subsequent costs that Cuenca is subject to. Economic analysis (cost-benefit analysis) can be applied as a useful tool to prioritize among these interventions options with respect to their efficiency and cost effectiveness. Some policy reforms may also require to understand the political economy of reforms, for example, when taxi technology or bus technology of private firms is to be changed.

The Tool for Rapid Assessment of City Energy (TRACE) is used for conducting rapid assessments of energy use in cities. It helps prioritize sectors with significant energy savings potential, and identifies appropriate energy efficiency interventions across six sectors-transport, municipal buildings, water and waste water, public lighting, solid waste, and power and heat. It is a simple, low-cost, user-friendly, and practical tool that can be applied in any socioeconomic setting. While this work focuses on the growth poles in Romania, the analysis was limited to the boundary of the center city of Brasov, due to the difficulty of collecting individual indicators for all the constituent localities of a metropolitan area. The report details the analysis carried out and the recommendations derived as a result, for district heating maintenance and upgrade, non-motorized transport, public transport development, parking restraint measures, municipal buildings audit and retrofit, street lighting timing program, and active leakage of water and pressure management.

This report is the output of the finalize toolkit phase (phase three) for the project sustainability toolkit for transport projects. The overall objective, as defined in the terms of reference, is 'to make development projects more sustainable by reducing the risk of failure of projects attaining their long-term development goals and enhance the prospects for their sustained impact on development ensuring that there is local commitment to longer-term buy-in'. The main deliverable of the project is a project sustainability toolkit, of which this report outlines the final version. This toolkit helps to gauge the potential for the project to be sustainable into the long-term and provide advice to help overcome common barriers to the successful development and implementation of projects. The guidance covers the expected opportunities and constraints related to sustainability. The toolkit is intended to reduce the risk of project failure in terms of sustainable development and enable recipient country clients to incorporate core sustainability principles into transport projects at every stage of project planning, design and delivery. This will improve the prospects for longer-term sustainability and will enhance the long-term impacts of development projects. Task Team Leaders (TTL's) will benefit from additional evidence that supports investments intended to consolidate long-term development, and borrowers will benefit from projects with improved and demonstrable longer-term beneficial impact. The toolkit provides general advice for transport sector investments and is not modally specific. Information on the sub-components of the key sustainability principles has not been included since it was considered that this did not add value or further understanding of the issues.

Air and sea transport power the global economy. Since the vast majority of trade is physical, it must travel by plane or ship to reach its market. In fact, high value, time-sensitive goods usually fly through at least two airports, and almost every container passes through at least two seaports. When ports are efficient, people receive the goods theyre waiting for, sellers receive payment, and global economic development is strengthened. Public-private partnerships (PPPs) push this development forward with greater speed and richer benefits. In this issue, handshake turns its attention to air and sea transport (expect a companion issue on road and rail in October 2012). In the air, we deconstruct myths surrounding airport PPPs, learn brutally honest lessons from experiences in airline privatization, and revisit the liberalization of African skies. For seaports, the authors examine private investment, glimpse the post concession era, and witness the PPP evolution.

This report is structured as follows. Chapter one analyzes the performance of Kazakhstan s trade. Chapter two presents an overview of recent developments in Kazakhstan regional and international trade integration. Chapter three examines in detail key issues related to market access, focusing on non-tariff measures and trade facilitation and logistics. Chapter four examines the services sector and offers a roadmap for actions to enhance its competitiveness. Chapter five addresses building institutional capacity for the trade and competitiveness agenda. The report s recommendations are summarized in the following table. In order of the four main messages of the report, they cover balancing regional and international integration efforts, measures to improve access to inputs and export markets by reducing non-tariff barriers and through trade facilitation measures, raising the quality and efficiency of the services sector, and strengthening institutional capacity to implement an effective trade policy and competitiveness agenda.

Infrastructure improvements contributed 0.6 percentage points to the annual per capita growth of Zambia's gross domestic product (GDP) over the past decade, mostly because of the exponential growth of information and communication technology (ICT) services. Poor performance of the power sector reduced the per capita growth rate by 0.1 percentage point. Simulations suggest that if Zambia's infrastructure platform could be improved to the level of the African leader, Mauritius, per capita growth rates could increase by two percentage points per year. Zambia's high generation capacity and relatively high power consumption are accompanied by fewer power outages than its neighbors. But Zambia's power sector is primarily oriented toward the mining industry, while household electrification, at 20 percent, is about half that in other resource-rich countries. Zambia's power tariffs are among the lowest in Africa and are less than half the level needed to accelerate electrification and keep pace with mining sector demands. Meeting future power demands and raising electrification rates will be difficult without increasing power tariffs. Zambia's infrastructure situation is more hopeful than that of many other African countries. Infrastructure spending needs, though large, are not beyond the realm of possibility, and Zambia's resource wealth and relatively well-off population provide a more solid financing basis than is available to many other countries. Zambia's infrastructure funding gap, though substantial, can be dramatically reduced through measures to stem inefficiencies and lower costs.

This paper uses a global general equilibrium simulation model to quantify the effects of lifting economic sanctions on Iran with and without strategic responses. Iran benefits the most, with average per capita welfare gains ranging from close to 3 percent, in the case when Iran's crude oil exports to the European Union recover to half their pre-embargo level, to 6.5 percent, in the best case of complete recovery of oil exports to the European Union, successful domestic reforms that enable a strong supply response, and increased market access for Iranian exports in developed markets. Iran could achieve benefits close to the upper range if Gulf Cooperation Council oil exporters limit their crude oil exports to support the oil price. If they do nothing, however, the price of oil will decline by 13 percent in the case of complete recovery of oil exports to the European Union, leaving net oil importers better off and net oil exporters worse off.

Among emerging economies, the region of Latin America and the Caribbean has been the hardest hit by the great global deceleration that started six years ago. In fact, the region is just now beginning to rebound after the first back-to back years of recession in more than 30 years. This economic downturn is understandably having some adverse effects. After faster economic growth supported by the commodity boom brought significant social progress, with historic reductions in poverty and inequality, a drop in economic activity is causing families to feel the pinch.

The primary objective of the Southern Gobi Regional Environmental Assessment (REA) is to provide guidance for sustainable management of environmental resources in the future development of the Southern Gobi Region (SGR), development that will be led by rapid expansion of mining. The REA defines two development scenarios-a base-case and a high case-and explores their direct and indirect impacts on the natural environment, taking into account the opportunities, constraints, and vulnerabilities of the Gobi natural systems; the individual and cumulative direct environmental impacts and potential indirect impacts of the planned development; and, at a general level, the institutional capacity to manage the impacts. The REA target audience includes government officials at central, regional, and local levels; private sector investors and the consultants who are engaged for project design and environmental impact assessment; development finance organizations; and Mongolian civil society. This report was discussed in draft form at stakeholder workshops held in Ulaanbaatar and Dalanzagdad in April 2009 and has been revised to reflect comments received. Thanks are due to all those who joined those discussions. The report draws on information from workshops held in Mongolia, in May, September, and October 2008, and a field mission to the Southern Gobi Region in November 2008. Other information was obtained from various mining companies in Mongolia including Ivanhoe mines Mongolia, Inc., and its consultant Eco Trade; Rio Tinto; Energy Resources LLC; and South Gobi Sands.