That Lima's water system was in near-crisis was not enough to bring about radical change. Partial reforms to reduce many of the city's worst problems were carried out under public management. But a quarter of Lima's citizens still had no access to water or sewerage connections, extended service...

Why did reform in Santiago improve water system performance, when similar reform attempts under public management in other countries failed? In the late 1980s, Chile planned to privatize Santiago's sanitary works enterprise (EMOS) but instead reformed it under public ownership. It did so through...

This paper presents the results of the estimations of a quality of life (QoL) index focusing on three dimensions: individual factors, urban factors, and civil society. The study was mainly based on results of a survey applied in three districts of Lima: La Victoria, Los Olivos and Villa El...

This study aims to identify the effects of Juntos, the conditional cash transfer program in Peru, on women's empowerment. Although the program does not envisage women's welfare as an objective per se, women play a key role as they are the main recipients of the cash transfer and are responsible...

The incomplete privatization of the electric sector in Peru provides a unique scenario for evaluating the impact of public versus private provision. The results in this paper suggest that management of electricity firms by the private sector leads to a significant improvement in the quality of...

This paper evaluates the determinants of school attendance and work of rural adolescents between 10 and 18 years old in 1997-1998 for a sample of Latin American countries. Rural adolescents are quite disadvantaged relative to their urban counterparts. The share of rural adolescents studying...

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...