When the La Niña drought hit Chile in 1998–99, the country's recently reformed electricity sector suffered a price collapse. Power outages followed—but were they inevitable? No. The electricity shortage can be blamed on the rigid price system and deficient regulatory governance. In the...

This paper reviews the Latin American experience with highway privatization during the last decade. Based on evidence from Argentina, Colombia and Chile, we find that private financing of new highways freed up fewer public resources than expected because public funds were often diverted to bail...

We study regulatory incentives and governance during the 1998-1999 electricity shortage in Chile. We argue that it was feasible to manage the shortage with no outages. The outages can be blamed on the rigid price system and deficiencies in regulatory governance, which led to a weak regulator...

Roads are being franchised to private firms in many countries, raising the issue of regulating the tolls they charge. When there is more than one road to get from one point to another, regulation need not be necessary, since competition may substitute for toll regulation. This paper studies toll...

We review the experience of both private toll-roads built in the United States during the 1990s, and argue that the problems they encountered could have been avoided if the length of the franchise contract would adapt to demand realizations. We also argue in favor of adjudicating private...