Multidimensional auctions are a natural and practical solution when auctioneers pursue more than one objective in their public-private-partnership transactions. However, it is difficult to achieve auction efficiency with multiple award criteria. Using auction data from road and railway...

Twenty years ago, as the United Kingdom was getting ready to launch the privatization of its public services, Professor Littlechild developed and operationalized the concept of price caps as a regulatory regime to control for residual monopoly conditions in those services. Ten years later, Latin...

This paper provides a "back-of-the-envelope" assessment of the efficiency effects of the reforms of the water sector in Argentina. Private operators are now key players in 15 of Argentina's provinces. While all have adopted incentive based regulatory regimes which require estimates of economic...

This paper is a first attempt at documenting efficiency levels in Africa's electricity firms, their evolution and the sources of this evolution. The analysis is based on a sample of 12 operators providing services in the 12 country members of the Southern Africa Power Pool. We focus on the...

The authors review about 80 studies on electricity and gas, water and sanitation, and rail and ports (with a footnote on telecommunications) in developing countries. The main policy lesson is that there is a difference in the relevance of ownership for efficiency between utilities and transport...

The authors show how relatively standard methodologies can help to measure the efficiency gains from reforming the organization of port infrastructure, how those measures can be used to promote competition between ports, and how competition can be built into an incentive-driven regulatory...

Forecasting has long been a challenge, and will remain so for the foreseeable future. But the analytical instruments and data processing capabilities available through the latest technology, and software, should allow much better forecasting than transport ministries, or regulatory agencies...