Material – Material infrastructure is defined as “those immobile, non-circulating capital goods that essentially contribute to the production of infrastructure goods and services needed to satisfy basic physical and social requirements of economic agents”. There are two distinct qualities of material infrastructures: 1) Fulfillment of social needs and 2) Mass production. The first characteristic deals with the basic needs of human life. The second characteristic is the non-availability of infrastructure goods and services. Economic – According to the business dictionary, economic infrastructure can be defined as “internal facilities of a country that make business activity possible, such as communication, transportation and distribution networks, financial institutions and markets, and energy supply systems”. Economic infrastructure support productive activities and events. This includes roads, highways, bridges, airports, water distribution networks, sewer systems, irrigation plants, etc. Social – Social infrastructure can be broadly defined as the construction and maintenance of facilities that support social services. Social infrastructures are created to increase social comfort and act on economic activity. These being schools, parks and playgrounds, structures for public safety, waste disposal plants, hospitals, sports area, etc. Core – Core assets provide essential services and have monopolistic characteristics. Investors seeking core infrastructure look for five different characteristics: Income, Low volatility of returns, Diversification, Inflation Protection, and Long-term liability matching. Core Infrastructure incorporates all the main types of infrastructure. For instance; roads, highways, railways, public transportation, water and gas supply, etc. Basic – Basic infrastructure refers to main railways, roads, canals, harbors and docks, the electromagnetic telegraph, drainage, dikes, and land reclamation. It consist of the more well-known features of infrastructure. The things in the world we come across everyday (buildings, roads, docks, etc). Complementary – Complementary infrastructure refers to things like light railways, tramways, gas/electricity/water supply, etc. To complement something, means to bring to perfection or complete it. So, complementary infrastructure deals with the little parts of the engineering world the brings more life. The lights on the sidewalks, the landscaping around buildings, the benches for pedestrians to rest, etc. |
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Infrastructure is the fundamental facilities and systems serving a country, city, or other area, including the services and facilities necessary for its economy to function. Infrastructure is composed of public and private physical improvements such as roads, bridges, tunnels, water supply, sewers, electrical grids, and telecommunications (including Internet connectivity and broadband speeds). In general, it has also been defined as “the physical components of interrelated systems providing commodities and services essential to enable, sustain, or enhance societal living conditions”.There are two general types of ways to view infrastructure, hard or soft. Hard infrastructure refers to the physical networks necessary for the functioning of a modern industry. This includes roads, bridges, railways, etc. Soft infrastructure refers to all the institutions that maintain the economic, health, social, and cultural standards of a country. This includes educational programs, official statistics, parks and recreational facilities, law enforcement agencies, and emergency services. both specific functional modes – highways, streets, roads, and bridges; mass transit; airports and airways; water supply and water resources; wastewater management; solid-waste treatment and disposal; electric power generation and transmission; telecommunications; and hazardous waste management – and the combined system these modal elements comprise. A comprehension of infrastructure spans not only these public works facilities, but also the operating procedures, management practices, and development policies that interact together with societal demand and the physical world to facilitate the transport of people and goods, provision of water for drinking and a variety of other uses, safe disposal of society’s waste products, provision of energy where it is needed, and transmission of information within and between communities. The word infrastructure has been used in French since 1875 and in English since 1887, originally meaning “The installations that form the basis for any operation or system”. The word was imported from French, where it was already used for establishing a roadbed of substrate material, required before railroad tracks or constructed pavement could be laid on top of it. The word is a combination of the Latin prefix “infra”, meaning “below” and many of these constructions are underground, for example, tunnels, water and gas systems, and railways and the French word “structure” (derived from the Latin word “structura”). The army use of the term achieved currency in the United States after the formation of NATO in the 1940s, and by 1970 was adopted by urban planners in its modern civilian sense. Personal – A way to embody personal infrastructure is to think of it in term of human capital.Human capital is defined by the Encyclopedia Britannica as “intangible collective resources possessed by individuals and groups within a given population”. The goal of personal infrastructure is to determine the quality of the economic agents’ values. This results in three major tasks: the task of economic proxies’ in the economic process (teachers, unskilled and qualified labor, etc.); the importance of personal infrastructure for an individual (short and long-term consumption of education); and the social relevance of personal infrastructure. Institutional – Institutional infrastructure branches from the term “economic constitution”. According to Gianpiero Torrisi, Institutional infrastructure is the object of economic and legal policy. It compromises the grown and sets norms. It refers to the degree of actual equal treatment of equal economic data and determines the framework within which economic agents may formulate their own economic plans and carry them out in co-operation with others.
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