No abstract

As cities in developing countries continue to grow rapidly, the need to meet the increasing demand for urban infrastructure services has become an important policy problem, since failures to respond adequately to such demand affect productivity and the quality of life in those cities. Based on a survey of manufacturing establishments in Nigerian cities, this paper shows manufacturers' responses to the deficiencies of various public infrastructure services and the extent of the costs of private provisions which serve as the alternatives to the firms. From the empirical observations, the authors develop several policy options: (1) regulatory changes to enable fuller utilisation of existing private provision capacities, such as allowing the sale of excess private power supply; (2) private sector participation in the supply of infrastructure services to make such markets contestable; and (3) pricing policies which will be more efficient in the presence of congestion, systems failures and variations in private provisions by firm size and location.

Su m m ary. This paper is a seq uel to an earlier paper on Nigeria publish ed in this journ al. U sin g the fresh resu lts obtain ed from the sam ple survey of m an ufactu rin g estab lish m en ts con ducted in Indonesia and Thailan d (a sam p le of 290 and 300 estab lish m ents, resp ectively ), the authors con trast and com pare the ® n dings from th ese new data with those of an earlier study on Nigeria. The m ain elem ents of com p arison s in clude: the exten t and inciden ce of pub lic infrastru cture de® cien cies; the exten t of m an ufactu rers' private provision resp onses to the de® cien cies; the cap ital shares of variou s private infrastru cture investm ents includ ing electric power, w ater, telecom m unication s, tran sport and waste disposal; an d, costs of prod ucing their own electrici ty and w ater. The exten t of pu blic infrastru ctu re de® cien cies and private provision s varies across the cou ntries and ® rm sizes. For exam ple, 92 per cent of the N igerian ® rm s had their ow n gen erators to su pplem ent the in adequate public supply, w hile the ® gure was 66 per cen t in Indonesia and on ly 6 per cen t in Thailan d. However, the quality of electric power in Thailan d w as not very d ifferen t from that of In donesia. The total share of cap ital investm ent in private infrastru cture was 16 per cent of the total cap ital in th e case of the Indonesian ® rm s w hich is com p arab le with 14 per cent in the case of th e Nigerian ® rm s, but is twice that of th e Thai ® rm s. The p rivate costs of in frastru cture de® cien cies are substan tial and the burdens are m uch greater for sm all ® rm s than large ® rm s, which h as a n egative im plication for the birth and grow th of ® rm s, hence em ploym ent and incom e gen eration , in cities in develop in g cou ntries.Kyu Sik Lee, former staff member of The W orld B ank, W ashington, DC, is at 7609 Honeywell Lane,

Using the factory registration data of the Ministry of Industry, the paper documents the location patterns of manufacturing establishments in the Bangkok Metropolitan Region and evaluates spatial policies in light of the observed decentralization trends of manufacturing activity. The paper also shows the location patterns of new firms and by firm size and analyzes infrastructure and site constraints for their growth. The paper discusses the need for spatial policies to be consistent with market forces and the need for infrastructure investment to respond to the location dynamics of service demand.