The authors provide empirical evidence on the impact that private participation in infrastructure has had on key macroeconomic variables in a sample of 21 Latin American countries from 1985-98. Specifically, they look at the effects on GDP per capita, current public expenditures, public...

This note provides a snapshot as of 2004 of the share of countries with an independent regulatory agency and with at least some private sector financing of its sectoral investment needs for electricity, water and sanitation, and telecommunications. Among other things, they show that: For...

Worldwide privatization of the telecommunications industry, and the introduction of competition in the sector, together with the ever-increasing rate of technological advance in telecommunications, raise new and critical challenges for regulation. Fo matters of pricing, universal service...

Governments should increasingly be able to rely on the private sector for help supporting (and financing) the transport sector - especially infrastructure support services for which there is heavy demand - but first they must improve their regulatory tools and sort out the institutional mess...

Almost a decade after Argentina began privatizing its railways, resolution of conflicts between regulators, users, and operators continues to take longer, and to be more difficult, than expected. The authors contend that many of these conflicts arose because there are no rules for interactions...

In many countries, well-meant ad hoc tax incentives proliferate over time, creating an opaque corporate tax structure and many unanticipated tax loopholes. Tax authorities in several countries have considered and sometimes introduced minimum corporate taxes. Liability under such a tax is...

The authors review the evidence on the state of infrastructure in the developing world, emphasizing the investment needs and the emerging policy issues. While their assessment is seriously constrained by data gaps, they provide useful insights on the main challenges ahead, emphasizing that, in...

Economists often characterize the regulation of monopolies as a"game"(between the regulator and the service provider) in which the two players do not share the same information. The regulator is assumed to have poorer information than the service provider about the scope of future efficiency...

The authors show that the potential benefit to a host country of forward markets or of foreign exchange guarantees depend on the investor's country of origin and on specific characteristics of investment. They show this in terms of the effects on foreign-exchange risks and on the amount of...

Efforts to reform utilities can affect poor households in varied, often complex, ways, but it is by no means certain that such reform will hurt vulnerable households. Many myths have been perpetuated in discussions of utility reform - and in many cases poor households have benefited from reform....