The authors review a number of recent innovative rail concessions. Each country has approached its problems differently, and each provides different insights into what can be achieved with concessions. But all the cases show that restructuring and substantial government investment in the design...

Price controls -- typically reviewed every five years in the United Kingdom -- have been controversial. The author traces the development of U.K. price controls and explains that the initial controls for electricity and water companies, based on underestimates of the companies' scope for...

The United Kingdom has pioneered the use of price control regulation. The periodic review of these controls lies at the core of the mechanism, and the UK experience shows that this review is complex and time-consuming and can be controversial. Based on the UK experience the author proposes a...

Hatton National Bank is the largest private commercial bank in Sri Lanka and one of the handful of commercial banks in the world that have initiated microfinance programs. The bank launched its program in 1989 as an integral part of its operations, motivated by two business objectives. First,...

The electricity supply industry in England and Wales was under public ownership from 1948 to 1990. For most of this period, the Central Electricity Generating Board (CEGB) operated all generation and transmission as a vertically integrated statutory monopoly. In 1990, the CEGB was restructured...

Mexico's private toll road program more than doubled the national toll road network from 1989 to 1994. The investment of approximately US$13 billion in the program was sourced from local commercial bank debt, concessionaire equity, and federal and state government grants and equity contribution....

This Note compares the effects of price cap and rate-of-return regulation on the risk borne by regulated utilities. It present evidence that price cap regulation subjects firms to greater risks and therefore raises their cost of capital. This result has one clear implication: firms regulated by...

One of the most important policy questions in the transition economies is what governments can do to speed the restructuring of firms and thus hasten the transition to a mature market economy. The authors report on a study that provides some answers. Privatization encourages restructuring if it...

The authors look at the rise of the Internet as the main application behind the emerging global information infrastructure. Many now believe that the Internet provides a window into a future in which access to information will be independent of geographic location and interactivity in a...

Critics of privatization often argue that its benefits come at a high cost to society. The authors test the validity of this criticism for Mexico's privatization program, one of the world's largest case-by-case programs. Assessing the performance of newly privatized firms in such areas as...