Policy recommendations for infrastructure provision usually build on a well-established understanding of best practice for sector governance. Too rarely are they adapted to the country-specific political environment even if this is an area where policy choices are likely to be subject to private...

In infrastructure, the possibility of a positive relationship between operators'profitability and the degree of concentration is a major political issue in view of the wide diversity of feelings about the potential role of the private sector. This is particularly important in view of (i) the...

Interventions to fix market failures in infrastructure have often resulted in some form of governance failure and this contributes importantly to explain shortcomings in the supply of infrastructure services in developing countries and increasingly in developed countries in crisis. The...

Policy recommendations for infrastructure provision usually build on a well-established understanding of best practice for sector governance. Too rarely are they adapted to the country-specific political environment even if this is an area where policy choices are likely to be subject to private...

The authors address the question of infrastructure reforms in a novel way by focusing on the impact which they can have on consumers through the prices paid by different groups and on their access to the networks. They analyse original material from four Latin American countries –...

The purpose of this paper is to provide a quantitative assessment of the degree of concentration in infrastructure industries at the regional and global levels. We calculate regional and global concentration indexes for electricity generation and distribution, water and sanitation, and fixed and...

The authors compare the two merger control systems currently employed worldwide: a mandatory system based on merger size threshold and a voluntary system with ex-post monitoring and fines. The voluntary system possesses two informational advantages: (i) the enforcement agency employs more...

This paper takes into account technological and output constraints for firms to analyse PDO regulation. We first examine an original dataset of French Brie cheese producers and compare the cost structure of PDO producers with non-PDO ones. The paper also finds that PDO firms face a more costly...

The electricity sector in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) suffers from a major paradox. Indeed, while the region continues to hold the world’s largest oil and gas reserves and has been able to maintain electricity access rates of close to 100 percent in most of its economies, it may...

The state of national labor markets has always been a concern for governments and development agencies such as the World Bank. Key labor market indicators, such as the rate of unemployment, send signals about the health of an economy and mirror citizens' attitudes. Being gainfully employed is an...