countries with the same income level as South Africa, the risk of such bias, while difficult to identify, should be minimized. Also, the indicators presented here are widely accepted and fairly unambiguous representations of major dimensions of sector performance. For these reasons, we believe that the benchmarking and comparisons are sufficiently meaningful and could prove useful in both analytical and policy studies of SACU countries’ infrastructure performance.

# **INFRASTRUCTURE PERFORMANCE IN THE SACU: A SYNTHETIC OVERVIEW**

**Overall, the SACU countries, on average, lag behind their comparator groups of countries in several major indicators of** **_access_ to basic infrastructure services (electricity, water & sanitation, ICT, and transport), though this performance varies widely across the SACU region.** Access performance is particularly lacking in the case of Swaziland whose indicators are more akin to a low-income country rather than a middle-income country that it is. In Lesotho, the only low-income country in the SACU region, access also lags behind its income group of countries. But even in South Africa, despite major gains in recent years in expanding access to electricity to the previously unserviced areas, further extension of access to poor areas is very much needed.

**Looking at the SACU region countries’ main infrastructure sectors, telephony and electricity are generally performing better in comparative terms, while access is particularly lacking in water and sanitation sectors.** This is especially true in Lesotho and Swaziland. Where data are available (e.g., South Africa; and for water and sanitation in all countries), the comparison shows a stark rural-urban divide with access in rural areas significantly behind the cities. Botswana’s low access to electricity (10%) is particularly stark compared with its benchmark income group (87%). But aggregate indicators may also hide inequities within larger urban areas where many peri-urban communities (e.g., in South Africa) continue to experience access problems with respect to basic infrastructure services. In the telecom sector, technical progress favoring cellular telephony already brings opportunities to SACU countries “leapfrog” from fixed lines to cellular telephony, much more rapidly catching up with comparator countries.

**The technical indicators of the quality of infrastructure service (e.g., system losses in electricity; phone fault rates; percentage of paved roads) in the SACU countries vary widely.** While some sectors (e.g., electricity) and countries (e.g., South Africa, Namibia) perform well, others (e.g., some dimensions of ICT performance; and even roads), especially in the poorer SACU countries, fall short of expected performance. Nevertheless, subjective perceptions of the quality of service are broadly favorable, but this may well reflect the urban bias in the surveys used to collect information for this indicator.

**While data performance indicators in rural vs. urban areas are not available for all countries and sectors, they (and other, supplemental information) do suggest a strong “urban bias” in infrastructure performance in all SACU countries.** In South Africa, for example, the available indicators on electricity, water and sanitation, and telephone services suggest that while urban areas score relatively well, there is a significant shortfall in access to improved water and sanitation in rural areas compared with the benchmark upper-middleincome countries. In the poorer SACU countries, some of the infrastructure services that matter most to the poor––water and sanitation––are lacking in rural areas. In Swaziland, for example,

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