This study provides a comprehensive efficiency analysis of water service providers in six countries in the Central American region. Pressures for sector reform have stimulated interest in identifying and understanding the factors that can contribute to network expansion, improved service...

Utility subsidies are often defended as promoting universal service. However, specific support formulas may be poorly targeted and/or designed. The U.S. high cost loop support (HCLS) program (formerly referred to as the Universal Service Fund (USF)), has been a key component of the FCC's USF...

This paper examines the robustness of efficiency score rankings across four distributional assumptions for trans-log stochastic production-frontier models, using data from 1,221 Japanese water utilities (for 2004 and 2005). One-sided error terms considered include the half-normal, truncated...

The U.S. high cost loop support (HCLS) program, formerly referred to as the Universal Service Fund (USF), has been a key component of the Federal Communications Commission's (FCC) program to promote telephone access in rural, high cost areas. This study uses data from 1140 rural telecom firms in...

This paper examines how government regulation in developing countries affects the form of corruption between business customers and service providers in the telecom sector. We match the World Bank enterprise-level data on bribes with a unique cross-country telecom regulation dataset collected by...

This paper evaluates regulation by contract in public-private partnerships (PPPs) in infrastructure services. Although the benefits of competition for the market and of regulatory contracts are widely acknowledged, the literature indentifies several failures in their design. These ‘flaws' are...

This article examines how risk is reflected in infrastructure regulatory contracts, using examples from water utilities to illustrate key points. Partnerships between public and private sectors in capital intensive network services require risks to be assigned to the contractual party that is...

This paper updates the literature on water utility benchmarking studies carried out worldwide, focusing on scale and scope economies. Using meta-regression analysis, the study investigates which variables from published studies influence these economies. Our analysis led to several conclusions....

This paper describes the constellation of factors affecting infrastructure investments and utility operations. Independent regulatory commissions exercise most direct control over two factors: governance (agency design and processes) and regulatory policies (or incentives). Other factors are...

The role of the state changed in Latin American and Caribbean countries between 1985 and 1995 as eight regulatory commissions were created (for the nineteen countries in our regional sample). This institutional innovation was part of the liberalization process that has permeated the hemisphere....