Economics Commons^™

Debris Of Progress: A Political Ethnography Of Critical Infrastructure, Ethan Tupelo

Doctoral Dissertations

In this dissertation, I advance a political ethnography of critical infrastructure to better understand terminal capitalism, in which the waste products of commodification and resource depletion are destroying the ecological systems that support life. My object of study is the massive disjuncture between individual knowledge and intention, and these catastrophic collective planetary outcomes. Theoretically, I develop critical infrastructure theory to diagnose these destructive structures. By “infrastructure,” I mean systems of material and discursive flows fundamental to sedentary human organization, connecting local actions with global systems. Such infrastructure is “critical” in three senses: A) denoting the most important forms of infrastructure …

The Influence Of The Electric Supply Industry On Economic Growth In Less Developed Countries, Edward Richard Bee

Dissertations

This study measures the impact that electrical outages have on manufacturing production in 135 less developed countries using stochastic frontier analysis and data from World Bank’s Investment Climate surveys. Outages of electricity, for firms with and without backup power sources, are the most frequently cited constraint on manufacturing growth in these surveys.

Outages are shown to reduce output below the production frontier by almost five percent in Africa and by a lower percentage in South Asia, Southeast Asia and the Middle East and North Africa. Production response to outages is quadratic in form. Outages also increase labor cost, reduce exports …