The Friuli Venezia Giulia (FVG) region situated on the Northeastern seashore of Italy is home to 1.2 million people. Less than one quarter of that population have access to a broadband connection faster than 30 Mbps.
... See More + Like other regions in Europe, the most competitive broadband services are offered in densely populated urban areas. In FVG, this includes Udine, Trieste, Pasian di Prato and Pordenone where it is commercially feasible for internet service providers to offer fast and affordable access solutions to their customers. It is worth noting that these four municipalities (communes) in FVG are home to only one third of the overall population of the region. The remaining 212 municipalities are split between two areas in terms of broadband coverage.
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The Connected Community Initiative (CCI) supports the achievements of the Europe 2020 Agenda and the Gigabit Society targets. The initiative was established in 2015 by the European Commission, Directorate General for Communication Networks, Content and Technologies (DG CONNECT) as a single donor trust fund implemented by the World Bank.
... See More + The initiative focuses on facilitating the flow of private and public investments to broadband connectivity projects and assist them in bringing their projects to a level of maturity that would enable funding from various public and private sources. The program was successful in channeling private and public funds into important broadband network deployment projects. With an overhead of only Euro 1 million, CCI was able to unlock approximately Euro 134 million. 10 projects were able to secure, or are in the process of securing, funding to construct their fiber-based broadband networks. These projects are the Rural Network (RUNE) projects in Croatia and Slovenia; ToPix project in Italy’s Piedmont region; and DSTelecom in Algarve, Alentejo, Lower Minho, and Norte regions in Portugal, Drenthe in the Netherlands, and Gran Canaria in Spain. Funding varied between public, private, private equity, and the Connecting Europe Broadband Facility (CEBF), or a mix of them. Thus, CCI will help connect approximately 687,000 homes in remote and underserved areas of the portfolio countries. CCI experience has shown that the challenges and opportunities in promoting broadband and ultrafast broadband deployment in rural and gray areas are considerable. However, project promoters can improve the chances of getting funding if they take into consideration specific measures to address the following: demand management, cost management, risk and infrastructure sharing, financial modelling, time-to-market and building a successful investment pitch. This report lays out the main findings of the CCI experience and elaborates on the factors that facilitated or inhibited the success of broadband financing and deployment projects. These factors depend on the countries, topographies, market conditions, national framework, etc. However, many are also in common, given that the regulatory framework is similar, most gray and rural areas are in challenging topographies and financing is scarce. These challenges and opportunities constitute the basis of the recommendations to be considered by the EC, national and regional governments, and regulatory bodies. In summary, support to project promoters shows that there are still major financial and commercial risks in investment in infrastructure in rural and in grey areas. State aid rules are not clear or cumbersome to abide by for incentivizing investment in gray areas and in networks of 100Mbps capacity and above. When state aid is not applicable, there is a need to provide other types of incentives to the private sector to encourage investment in these areas. Attention should be given to the rules and practices that are crowding out private investment such as the requirements for the declaration of commercial interest in gray zones, the clawback mechanism for companies benefiting from state aid, and the mapping of grey and white zones. The technical assistance conducted by the World Bank showed that there are measures that policy makers can put take to facilitate bridging the financing gap in lagging zones. Looking forward, project promoters and financiers can replicate the lessons learned from the CCI in their future projects and investments. But beyond replicability at the same community levels, the CCI can be scaled up and made replicable in more regions and countries in the EU, and in neighboring and EU-acceding countries.
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Report 135244 MAR 12, 2019
Haddad,Marolla; Stoykov,Petar Georgiev; Abdul Khalek,Joulan; Bezzina,JeromeDisclosed
Boosting convergence and shared prosperity in the European Union achieved renewed urgency after the global financial crisis of 2008. This paper assesses the role of agriculture and the Common Agricultural Program in achieving this.
... See More + The paper sheds light on the relationship between poverty and agriculture as part of the process of structural transformation. It positions each member country on the path toward a successful structural transformation. The paper then evaluates at the regional level where the Common Agricultural Program funding tends to go, poverty-wise, within each country. This approach enables making more informed policy recommendations on the current state of the Common Agricultural Program funding, as well as evaluating the role of agriculture as a driver of shared prosperity. The analysis performed throughout the paper uses a combination of data sources at several spatial levels.
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Policy Research Working Paper WPS8638 NOV 05, 2018
Azevedo,Joao Pedro Wagner De; Van Den Brink,Rogier J. E.; Corral,Paul; Avila,Montserrat; Zhao,Hongxi; Mostafavi,Mohammad-HadiDisclosed
The availability and affordability of decent housing has become an important economic and social concern in the European Union (EU), as housing price increases in metropolitan regions have often outpaced wage increases.
... See More + Housing is at the heart of growing economic divides in Europe. This is because productivity growth, which comes with higher wages and better jobs, is concentrated in cities and industrial clusters. Housing is unaffordable in metropolitan centers because the construction of new homes has not kept up with demand, reducing the standard of living of low-income households, and dissuading workers from moving to the most productive regions. While policy incentives have favored homeowners since the 1970s, less attention and resources have been devoted to easing the potential barriers and market restrictions that would allow housing supply to respond to increases in demand. Across EU member states, policymakers should focus on ensuring that land use, rental and other regulations are consistent with incentives to spur residential construction. The report highlights three key recommendations for EU policymakers: earmark unused public land for housing development and speed up approval processes; invest in greenfield projects with improved transportation links from suburban areas, to ensure cities cast a wider economic net; and create public registries to improve transparency of house sale prices to help greater competition between areas.
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Direct poverty estimates from the EU-SILC are only reliable at the statistical area level, and thus at the NUTS-2 level. This complicates the analysis of poverty at more disaggregated levels since the reliability of direct estimates are questionable.
... See More + Data from the Census of Population, Households and Dwellings 2011 coupled with small area estimation techniques aide policy makers overcome the lack of precision at lower geographical levels. The results from the poverty mapping exercise, coupled with spatial analysis reveal the heterogeneity of poverty in Croatia. Results from spatial analysis reveal that there is a cluster of high poverty in the Central and Eastern region of Croatia. There is a clear poverty demarcation in the country, where the Central and Eastern part of the country is clearly doing worse than the rest of the country. Results also reveal that while the Continental NUTS-2 spatial unit, may seem poorer than the Adriatic, the result is mainly driven by the aggregation of the two statistical regions (Northwest, and the Central and Eastern statistical regions). The use of the poverty map in order to assist in the guidance of resource allocation can help policy makers achieve considerable gains in poverty reduction. Additionally, the visual format of the maps is simple to understand which makes it easy for the population at large to take notice of where their community stands compared to the rest of the country. Moreover, because the maps are based on established data sets, these are objective. As a result, the maps may help prevent subjective decision making. Given the mentioned uses of the poverty maps these are valuable component of the policymaker’s tool kit when trying to decide where limited funds can be distributed among the population which needs assistance.
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Top-IX offers a Euro 20million project opportunity requiring a Euro12 million investment, resulting in a Net-Present Value (NPV) of Euro 8 million.
... See More + This proposition is based on expanding Top- IX’ current telecommunications broadband network of 33 Points-of-Presence (POPs) by a further 50 POPs in Piemonte and surrounding areas. The key financial results of this proposition are an Internal-Rate-of-Return (IRR) of 12 percent and a payback of 7 years. As this is a ‘brown field’ proposition (expanding an existing network), the operation will be EBITDA positive from year one. Top-IX is a non-profit consortium with 85 members including both, public and private participation. Top-IX is run by a team of 19 professional employees and 6 external collaborators. Its mission is to boost innovation and unlocking local value by leveraging access to broadband infrastructure. Top-IX is currently the only Open-Access-Network player in the Piemonte region. The regional broadband expansion enabled by Top-IX has created a huge market demand for more backhauling solutions. Large industrial users and their ecosystem of SMEs will benefit from a direct connection to a backhaul network enabling them to provide Industry 4.0 services. The progressive diffusion of IOT-related services will further trigger a huge demand for a new generation of network (cyber) security architectures and solutions.
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The 2015 Paris Climate Agreement was the first instance of countries adhering to take a collective action against global warming. More than 190 countries came forward and submitted their contributions in the form of Intended Nationally Determined Contributions, reflective of their ability and capacity to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, as each country set its own targets and actions.
... See More + For some countries, it meant a significant decline in their emissions by 2030, while others, like China, the United States, and India, decided on a more gradual phasing out extending beyond 2030. This paper estimates the economic impacts of implementation of the Paris Climate Agreement in terms of its implications for welfare, gross domestic product, investments, and trade for major countries and regions. It uses a computable general equilibrium framework to model global, regional, and country impacts. The analysis suggests that the economic impacts will be mostly felt in the European Union if the Paris Agreement is fully implemented. The European Union is likely to suffer a welfare loss of 1.0 to 1.5 percent by 2030. Among non-European countries, Australia, New Zealand, and Mexico will also be affected, with an expected welfare loss of about 1.5 percent. Some of the major emitters, such as China and India, will experience minimal impacts to their welfare, and the United States will experience a welfare loss of only about 0.7 by 2030. The sectoral analysis of production and trade suggests a significant loss to fossil fuel–based sectors, while clean energy sectors can experience significant gains.
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Policy Research Working Paper WPS8392 APR 02, 2018
Inclusive and sustainable growth requires innovative methods and policies to overcome unsustainable development practices. Breaking from the historic development model to promote clean growth is necessary to ensure that developing countries do not degrade their environment as their economies grow, yet the measurement of this factor remains elusive in development work.
... See More + To ease a shift in development practices, it is then crucial to develop meaningful measures of green growth to compare economic and environmental change over time. Here, the report presents a multi-stage exercise to understand green growth, beginning with benchmarking national environmental stocks and ambient conditions. The authors then develop an approach to observe decoupling trends between environmental externalities and economic growth to better understand how a country’s environmental and economic performance relate to one another at macroeconomic and sectoral levels. Based on the results of the baseline and decoupling exercises, the authors develop hypotheses to explain the observed relationships between economic and environmental indicators and the foundational factors that may underlie them. The authors explore these hypotheses through policy implications and methodological requirements, with the ultimate goal of explaining relationships related to developmental impacts on ecosystems. To illustrate this process, the authors focus on selected European Union (EU) countries, drawing upon and complimenting World Bank systematic country diagnostic reports for Romania, Croatia, and Poland. Through this exercise, the authors conclude that the examination of baseline conditions and decoupling are useful tools for informed policymaking, and that with the availability of further refined data, green growth analyses can move toward understanding causal relationships between economic growth and environmental impacts.
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The objective of this report is to identify policies, financing and delivery mechanisms with the view of scaling-up thermal retrofit of existing residential and public buildings in Bulgaria, Croatia, Poland, and Romania.
... See More + These two segments of the building sector are critical to national goals for EE improvement, environmental protection and social development. Also, compared to other sectors, they remain underserved by existing programs and traditional financing mechanisms. With this in mind, the report focuses on Croatia and Bulgaria and identifies a menu of actionable and implementable interventions around program models, financing schemes, and institutional set-ups that take into account current policy and market conditions in the target countries, as well as examples of international good practice.
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