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# **1. Introduction**

This paper reviews the recent economic research on emerging issues for infrastructure policies affecting poor people in developing countries. Its main purpose is to identify some of the challenges the international community, and donors in particular, are likely to have to address over the next few years. Though the literature on infrastructure is relatively modest relative to the academic coverage of other public services such as education and health, its specialized and technical sectoral coverage is still too large to be given fair treatment here. Thus this is a very selective survey of the three main sources of policy-oriented research on infrastructure:

- Academic journals

- Donors and other international organizations

- The World Wide Web.<sup>1</sup>

Academic journals have a major advantage over the two other sources of research: they impose standard, generally demanding academic quality controls—typically involving blind peer reviews of the analytical tools and diagnostics used by researchers. In addition, these journals are ranked by the academic market (although their rankings are the subject of heated debates in the academic community). This process generates fairly high accountability for the validity of the policy messages emerging from academic research. Academic journals also have a disadvantage. For a variety of reasons, most policy issues are seldom treated as specifically as country authorities would like them to be for immediate use on the ground. Still, the top-ranked journals tend to be important opinion-makers and hence are a useful source of information on emerging issues.

There are two main types of coverage of policy issues in the academic literature. _Sectoral coverage_ tends to address issues targeted to specific infrastructure sub-sectors (i.e. energy, telecommunications or transport) or to the whole infrastructure sector and generally has a bias toward microeconomic policy issues associated with the sector (such as regulation, technological choices, pricing, investments, and cost-benefit analysis). _Generic thematic coverage of policy issues_ tends to be addressed in more development oriented publications and included in the discussion of a wide range of more strategic policies (e.g fiscal, trade, privatization, safety nets, environmental).

_The specialized (sub-)sectoral literature_ on infrastructure has been impressively active since the early 1990s. And while it generally focuses on issues in industrial countries, an increasing amount covers concerns specific to developing countries. Relevant journals include _Energy Economics_ , _Energy Journal_ , _Information Economics and Policy_ , _Journal of Transport Economics and Policy_ , _Journal of Housing Policy_ , _Journal of Urban Economics_ , _Transport Policy_ , _Transport Reviews_ , _Telecommunications Policy_ , and _Water Policy_ . All of these journals have been major drivers of the growing knowledge and of the debates on emerging policy issues in the sectors they cover. Of equal importance at the microeconomic level are the many publications focused on thematic issues (e.g. regulation, pricing or financing) often addressed at a more general sector level including the _Journal of Regulatory Economics_ , _International Journal of Industrial Organization_ , _Journal of Industrial Economics_ , and _Rand Journal of Economics_ . In

> 1 Because of oversight or ignorance, the survey probably excludes references, including many books,  that should have been included, and for that I apologize.