per 1,000 people for LICs and LMCs, respectively, by 2012. Electricity-generating capacity more than doubled among UMCs, growing from 0.33 MW per 1,000 people in 1990, to 0.72 MW per 1,000 people in 2012.

_Transportation_ . Assessing the performance of transport infrastructure involves the examination of trends in the lengths of road and rail networks (expressed in kilometers (km)) and normalized, in this case, by the surface area of the country (in square km). In 2011, Sub-Saharan Africa registered the lowest road density among the developing regions under analysis (Table 2). Moreover, Sub-Saharan Africa is the only region where road density has declined over the past 20 years. The density of the railroad network is likewise low, at less than 0.002 km per square km of surface area by 2014, and this density has been declining. Although South Asia has also seen a decline in rail density, it continues to outperform other regions in this measure.

The evolution of road density across income groups in Sub-Saharan Africa over the past two decades shows that road density has declined over time among LMCs. This might capture the fact that the expansion of the road network is not as fast as the pace of urbanization in these countries. The data also reveal a large gap in road density for LICs and LMCs relative to UMCs, and that this gap has increased sharply over time. Finally, the road density among UMCs in Sub-Saharan Africa (1.04 km per square km of surface area) is larger than the regional median of all other developing regions. The trends observed in railroad density are similar to those in roads: there has been a decline in the density of railroads among the region’s LICs and LMCs over the past two decades, which might be attributed to poor maintenance. At the same time, railroad density remained almost invariant among UMCs, and it was outperformed only by South Asia.

# **Infrastructure Quality**

It is imperative for the region to reduce the gap in the quantity of infrastructure. At the same time, the quality of these service-providing capital goods will be the major contributor to their optimal usage. The quality measures examined here can be objective or subjective. The former refers to hard/objective measurements (for example, electric power and transmission losses); the latter refers to perceptions of the quality and reliability of these services obtained from entrepreneur surveys—such as the quality of infrastructure indicators from the WEF’s Global Competitiveness Report.<sup>7</sup> _Telecommunications_ . Lack of data availability across sections and, more importantly, over time prevents us from capturing the quality of the services of fixed telephone and mobile lines. However, the quality of Internet services can be approximated by the international bandwidth connection (which captures used capacity and average traffic load). Over the past 15 years, there has been a broad-based increase in Internet speed throughout the world. In Sub-Saharan Africa, the bits per second per Internet user grew from 97 in 2000, to 4,370 in 2015 (Table 3). In South Asia, this indicator is nearly twice as large (8,816), and in the remaining regions it is between 27,000 and 44,000 bits per second per Internet user.

There has been an increase in capacity and traffic on the Internet for all income groups in Sub-Saharan Africa. The largest improvement is evidenced for UMCs, with this group seeing Internet traffic volume greater than the regional median of other developing areas—except East Asia and Latin America (35,764 and 43,394 bits per second for every user, respectively).

> 7 It is important to note that this survey, which was conducted by the WEF’s Global Competitiveness Report, captures the perceptions of businesspeople about the quality of infrastructure in the country. These indicators take values from zero (worst) to seven (best). The periods under analysis for this section are 2006 and 2015.

_Infrastructure in Sub-Saharan Africa - 6_