Direct subsidies are an increasingly popular means of making infrastructure services more affordable to the poor. Under the direct subsidy approach, governments pay part of the water bill of poor households that meet certain criteria. This approach was first used in water sector reforms in Chile...

Reform of the water, electricity, and telecommunications sectors is gathering momentum in nearly all developing countries. Reform should include an assessment of whether subsidies are necessary and if so, how to design subsidies that reach their intended beneficiaries accurately and do not...

Government interventions in energy markets have many effects on the poor. But there has been little measurement of these effects, making it hard to know exactly what the effects of a project have been, and hard to compare those of different interventions. This could be rectified by building...

Argentina's natural gas industry was privatized at the end of 1992. Prior to divestiture, the state-owned monopoly Gas del Estado was divided into two transport and eight distribution companies, all of which were sold through international bidding. An independent government body, Ente Naal...