ABSTRACT
The term infrastructure was defined recently (Diamond and Spence, 1989) as ‘the collective and integrative basis for economic activity’. This overshort and somewhat glossy definition camouflages perhaps too many of the difficulties encountered in defining this term. In fact the word has come to mean many different things to interested commentators. Although it is usually thought of as a material item such as a transport facility or a piece of community infrastructure, most certainly it can also be thought of in non-material terms such as the educational or skill level of a workforce or the quality of public safety in an area. It is however perhaps best considered as possessing in varying quantities, according to type of infrastructure, some of the following characteristic attributes. Infrastructure provision usually involves high levels of capital expenditure. In many instances this expenditure is provided from the public purse although this notion of the publicness of infrastructure is becoming more and more blurred as the private sector plays a more important role. Much infrastructure, it can be said, is at least under public regulation or influence. Such costly public capital expenditure often only achieves low levels of productivity measured in conventional ways. It tends to service a wide variety of economic activities for a long time often at low or zero cost. Now it is not difficult to think of examples of infrastructure types which do not conform exactly to the characteristics outlined above but most exhibit many of such features. Infrastructure provision has an undoubted integrative function in the economy providing a sound social and economic foundation for production and facilitating the necessary transactions demanded by contemporary society.
