In the early 1990s Mexico City's Federal District (the D.F.) initiated a series of service contracts with four operators in the private sector, each to be implemented in three stages over ten years. The idea was to introduce competitive pressures and to find out if a "gradualist" aaproach would...

"Competition in public procurement auctions in the water supply and sanitation sector is largely limited. This is partly because of high technical complexity and partly because of auction design flaws. The division of lot contracts is an important policy choice for auctioneers to achieve...

"Given the relatively small segment of the population that faces genuine affordability problems in Latin America, there appears to be a promising case for using targeted subsidies to reconcile the cost recovery objective with social protection concerns. Social tariff schemes of various kinds are...

"In many countries water supply is a service that is seriously underpriced, especially for residential consumers. This has led to a call for setting cost recovery policies to ensure that the tariffs charged for water supply cover the full cost of providing for the service. Yet, the question...

"This paper uses a new dataset, "WATSAN," of private sector participation (PSP) projects for water and sanitation in developing countries to examine the determinants of the number of projects signed for each country between 1990 and 2004. The new dataset improves on existing sources, in...

"China has experienced a wide-scale and rapid transformation from an agricultural based economy to the manufacturing workshop of the world. The associated relocation of the population from relatively low density rural areas to very high density urban areas is having a significant impact on the...

"The authors show how willingness to pay surveys can be used to gauge household demand for improved network water and sanitation services. They do this by presenting a case-study from Sri Lanka, where they surveyed approximately 1,800 households in 2003. Using multivariate regression, they show...

"In the early 2000s, the Government of Sri Lanka considered engaging private sector operators to manage water and sewerage services in two separate service areas: one in the town of Negombo (north of Colombo), and one stretching along the coastal strip (south from Colombo) from the towns of...

"This paper summarizes the key findings and conclusions of a literature review of small-scale private service providers (SPSPs) of water supply and electricity conducted over a six-month period in 2003. It draws on more than 400 documents-including journals, articles, reports, case studies and...

"The authors describe and analyze an unconventional approach to river basin management in a developing country undergoing rapid economic, political, and institutional change. The founding of the Brantas River Basin Management Corporation (Perum Jasa Tirta I - PJT 1), a national state-owned...