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...

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....

Road transport has long been the dominant form of transport for freight and passenger movement throughout the world. Because most road projects require investments with long amortization periods and because many projects do not generate enough demand to become self-financing through some type of...

Thirty years ago, in 1974, Chile launched the first large-scale privatization in a developing country. About 15 years later, Argentina provided a new model of global infrastructure management. Since then a variety of public-private partnerships in infrastructure have been adopted throughout the...

The evolution of transport public-private partnerships (PPPs) in developing and developed countries since the early 1990s seems to be following a similar path: private initiatives work for a while but after a shock to the sector takes place the public sector returns as regulator, owner or...

The most effective regulators in developing countriesare following remarkably similar approaches. The main common element across"best practice"countries is the use of relatively simple quantitative models of operators'behavior and constraints to measure the impact of regulatory decisions on some...

Providing a more complete framework for assessing the efficiency of government intervention requires moving away from the idealistic perspective typically found in the normative approach to traditional public economics, contend the authors. Such a move requires viewing the government not as a...

The authors analyze the determinants of the efficiency levels reached by twenty one African water utilities. They assess efficiency through the estimation of a production frontier for the sector in Africa. The efficiency estimates confirm much of the common perceptions from partial productivity...

The authors provide an overview of recent privatization experiences in Argentina, Brazil, and Chile. They focus on both achievements and outstanding problems in the electricity sector. They pay special attention to the issue of whether regulators can enforce compliance and sustain the spirit of...

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...