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The notion, technologies and organizational elaboration of traceability have become more prominent and more systematic in recent years in many different fields, notably food. This chapter argues that traceability has many faces: it is a programmatic value embedded in norms and regulations; it is a frontier of technology development such as blockchain, and it is a continuous processual and political dynamic of organizational connectedness, leading also to resistance. These different aspects make up “traceability infrastructures,” which embody a number of tensions and dynamics. Three such dynamics are explored in this chapter: the tension between organizational entities and meta-entities, problems of agency and the distribution of responsibility, and dialectics of connectivity and disconnectivity. These three dynamics generate three testable propositions, which define a prolegomena for a new subject of “traceability studies.” Overall, traceability is argued to be an ongoing process of connecting discrete agencies – a process of “chainmaking” – and is formative of more or less stable forms of distributed agency and responsibility.

In the aftermath of the global financial crisis, transparency became a rhetorical token used to provide a solution to financial problems. This study examines how transparency materialized in the context of the European securitization industry, which was largely blamed for the credit crunch. The authors show that although transparency was broadly associated with a political call for financial system reform, in the European securitization industry it provided the basis on which to repurpose its market infrastructure. The authors introduce the concept of transparency work to show that transparency is a market achievement organized as a standardization network of heterogeneous actors aiming at establishing a new calculative infrastructure for managing credit risk. Combining insights from information infrastructure research and Economic Sociology, the authors contribute to a distributed and networked understanding of information infrastructure development.

In 2021, a public library in Ontario, Canada established a branch in an affordable housing building. Using interviews with library and support workers who work in the building (n = 8) and an analysis of media that describes the partnership (n = 16), this chapter explores how their partnership may create social infrastructure for tenants. Social scientists have positioned strengthening social infrastructure, a community’s network of systems and spaces that facilitate social relationships, as an antidote to many of society’s most pressing social issues, such as social inequity. An understanding of this partnership, its purpose, and how it intends to serve neighborhood members provides insight into how public libraries and non-profit and community organizations together provide social infrastructure for those living in affordable housing. Strengthening a community’s social infrastructure may be a vital step toward building socially sustainable communities in the twenty-first century.

This chapter uses data from the World Bank’s Private Participation in Infrastructure project database, and hand-collected evidence on project performance, to examine how PPPs are applied to infrastructure development in Africa, and how well they have delivered expected benefits. It has two analytical parts: an investment trend analysis and a meta-analysis of project performance and explanatory factors. The analysis shows growth both in number and volume of PPP investments that is weaker than that observed in other developing regions, and more volatile. The performance of PPP contracts appears to be improving over time with an overall cancelation rate of 7% over the assessment period. Although PPPs have contributed to increasing infrastructure stock, they have not completely met their potential, especially with respect to increasing infrastructure access rates. The main determinants of performance include accuracy of costing and allocation of risks, consistency of macro policies with the objectives and functioning of PPPs, coherence of sector policies and plans and local capacity. Contract cancellations are mainly explained by the misalignment of outcomes with government objectives, in particular, access and investment objectives. These findings suggest that PPP application should be well planned to ensure coherence of a wide range of policies, readiness of institutions and capacity of public sector actors. This chapter contributes to closing information gaps on a relatively novel policy instrument, and provides useful evidence to support prudent policy making at the time of considerable growth in PPP application.

The chapter is devoted to the factors aimed at optimizing the partnership of public and private sectors in the sphere of public infrastructure development. In modern conditions of economic slowdown and budget consolidation in Russia, the infrastructure has become the most important driver of economic growth and public–private partnership (PPP) – the most perspective form of cooperation of public and private investors of infrastructure projects. PPP interpretation as a structural relationship of economic system allows the authors to model optimal combination of formal and informal institutions in order to stimulate long-term economic growth. It becomes promising to model replacement of budget funds by private investment to ensure positive impact on the Russian development despite the budget consolidation. It could only be achieved in the case of formal institutionalization of appropriate conditions for private investors as to low transactional costs and attractive financial parameters. There have been determined some PPP standards connected with public infrastructure projects in order to reduce capital expenditures of the budget funds and increase the inflow of private investment. The authors have managed to obtain model estimates and graphic interpretation of government expenditures’ efficiency increase that could help to structure the fiscal conditions to induce positive multiplier effect as a result of PPP forms improvement in the public infrastructure development.

This chapter explores the concept of market infrastructure, which is tentatively defined as a materially heterogeneous arrangement that silently supports and structures the consummation of market exchanges. Specifically, the authors investigate the enactment of market infrastructure in the US grocery retail sector by exploring how barcodes and related devices contributed to modify its market infrastructure during the period 1967–2010. Combining this empirical case with insights from previous research, the authors propose that market infrastructures are relational, available for use, modular, actively maintained, interdependent, commercial, emergent and political. The authors argue that this conception of market infrastructure provides a powerful tool for unveiling the complex agencements and engineering efforts that underpin seemingly superficial, individual and isolated market exchanges.

This chapter analyses some internal territorial and economic conflicts in Spain among its autonomous communities. The Basque country has a very favourable tax system from 1878, which historically is stipulated in the Spanish constitution as a special case. This generates an asymmetry with respect to the other 18 Spanish communities including Catalonia, which would like to have a fiscal regime similar to that of the Basque country. After the Spanish state has built the fiscal balances for all autonomous communities, the Catalans argue that Spain steals them and they demand independence for Catalonia, which would affect the political and economic stability of the European Union. Specifically, this chapter attempts to describe a way to resolve territorial conflicts that have been exacerbated by the results of the fiscal balances in a context of fiscal decentralisation, since capital stock balances are not considered in the fiscal balances or in the inter-regional balance of payments. In this chapter, a production function approach, where the public capital production factor is separated into internal and imported capital stock, is used to calculate how the capital stock of the transportation infrastructure actually used can affect the labour productivity in each province or region. This study takes into account the direct effects of the capital stock of the road transport infrastructure of a region and the indirect effects that it receives from the use of infrastructures in other regions. Both types of public capital have been calculated by a network analysis, which allows us to calculate the stock of public capital effectively used in commercial activities, across 47 Spanish provinces during the period 1980–2007. The author estimates the spillover effects using spatial panel data techniques including spatial auto-correlation models with auto-regressive disturbances. In terms of labour productivity, the results indicate that the stock of imported capital is highly significant in all estimates while internal capital is not significant for all Spanish provinces, which classifies the Spanish provinces into users and used. This indicates that capital stock balances should be considered in some way into the inter-regional compensation fund to balance local fiscal balances, minimising some conflicts among regions.

This article suggests that given the fulfilment of a number of preconditions Public–Private Partnerships (PPPs) may be attractive instruments for countries in Africa seeking to improve the quality and competitiveness of their services base, particularly the so-called infrastructure services. This article builds, in addition to a selective review of the vast literature on PPPs, on first-hand practical experience on the ground and a number of pilot projects. This methodological approach provides a non-exhaustive PPP mapping in Africa, which in turn leads to a discussion of some of the challenges and risks to PPPs in Africa. It also covers a discussion of the recent trends in the approach to improving the enabling environment upon which are based a few policy recommendations, respectively: establishing an institutional framework for PPPs; designing a realistic and efficient strategy for enabling environment improvement; and finally moving from national-level initiatives to intergovernmental initiatives. This article takes the position that a series of pitfalls and shortcomings, many of which are associated with the enabling institutional environment and the governance framework, need to be addressed if PPPs are to deliver their full potential in Africa. It is believed that the national and intergovernmental PPP initiatives could lend significant support to achieving the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development in Africa. In addition to the reviewing and discussing primarily the most recent literature on PPPs, the main value addition of our chapter brings to the literature is derived from the presentation of recent PPP cases, which draw directly from the authors own practical experience on the ground.

Purpose – This chapter investigates the role of infrastructure aid to developing countries for determining the effect on national income and consumer welfare. The chapter further demonstrates the conditions for the Dutch disease effect by decomposing the output effects of infrastructure aid into the initial factor-saving effect, factor-substitution effect and nontraded good effect.

Methodology/approach – This chapter extends the Heckscher−Ohlin model to a 3×2 case with two traded goods and a nontraded good, and derives comparative static results on factor prices, the price of nontraded goods, foreign exchange rate, sectoral outputs, and national income and consumer welfare.

Findings – It is shown that for a recipient country, infrastructure aid to either the export or import sector necessarily raises national income and consumer welfare, whereas the same aid to the nontraded good sector does not affect national income but raises consumer welfare. Infrastructure aid may lead to a Dutch disease effect via its three effects on industrial outputs: the initial factor-saving effect, factor-substitution effect and nontraded good effect.

Research limitations/implications – This chapter considers infrastructure capital as a public input, but it is devoid of analysis of inter-industrial spillover effects that the infrastructure capital generates to other sectors.

Practical implications – This chapter reveals several aspects of infrastructure aid that the practitioners of aids must consider.