The need for greater efficiency and accountability in the power sector in the Middle East and North Africa has renewed pressure for reforms. A major new World Bank report, Rethinking Power Sector Reform in the Developing World (Foster and Rana 2020), examines how developing countries have...

Private financing and private participation in service delivery will be required if Sub-Saharan Africa is to achieve affordable, reliable, sustainable, and modern energy for all by 2030. To find out how to elicit private interest in power sector investments in the region, we surveyed 51 private...

Before the onset of the global financial crisis in late 2008, countries in Eastern Europe and Central Asia (ECA) experienced strong economic growth. Demand for electricity increased steadily with gross domestic product (GDP). GDP grew, on average, 6.5 percent between 2000 and 2007, and...

More than a decade of ambitious sector reform has led to a period of stability in the Armenian energy sector. The sector faces challenges more typical of a developed economy than an emerging one: policymakers' concerns have shifted from avoiding total system collapse to optimizing the energy...

The level of performance of an electric utility is determined by the soundness of its financial situation, the efficiency of its technology, and the quality of service it provides customers. Its financial underpinning is a balance of costs and revenue (from customer payments, government, and...

The COVID-19 pandemic has spurred unprecedented economic disruption globally. The full scope of the virus's impact on human health and economic activity remains to be seen, but two things are clear: (1) the most fragile economies, and most vulnerable segments of the world's population, are least...

In the wake of the Soviet Union's collapse, Armenia, like other former Soviet republics, began to struggle with the implications of its newfound independence. In the electricity sector, this meant learning how to manage and sustain a fragment of a system that had never been designed to function...