The transition to a market economy in Eastern Europe requires eliminating some institutions and practices and introducing new agencies with new goals, staffed by people with different attitudes and behavior. After interviewing 42 World Bank experts and other experts in the donor and academic...

The authors contribute to the field of urban governance and globalization through an empirically-based exploration of determinants of the performance of cities. They construct a preliminary worldwide database for cities, containing variables and indicators of globalization (at the country and...

In a globalizing world, cities at or near the apex of the international urban hierarchy are among the favored few--New York, London, and Tokyo--that have acquired large economic, cultural, and symbolic roles. Among a handful of regions that aspire to such a role--such as Hong Kong, Miami, and...

The task of urban managers is to ensure the provision of basic urban services, such as water, waste removal, security, transport, and an environment conducive to economic activity, while maintaining fiscal sustainability of city operations. City managers in developing countries face increasing...

Private services could contribute greatly to economic growth in Russia and the other former Soviet states. The authors use econometric analysis to identify the gap between expected and actual levels of service activities in these countries and simulate the effect on GDP and employment of closing...

World Bank lending and advice to support institutional and policy reform of public expenditure management is of recent and limited, but rapidly expanding scope. The paper begins with a brief overview of the Bank's recent work on public expenditures. The analysis indicates the lack of a...

In 1990, Argentina privatized its state-owned telephone company, ENTel. Shifting telecommunications to the private sector was one of the first actions taken under the reform program of the new president, Carlos Saul Menem. In privatizing ENTel, the government focused on privatization as a way of...

Over six decades, Chile experimented with three regulatory regimes and ownership patterns for its telecommunications sectors, each with radically different investment patterns. Until 1970, Chile relied on private ownership and rate-of-return regulation, but excess demand persisted. In the 1970s,...

In the past decade the United Kingdom has emerged as a world pacesetter for institutional change in the telecommunications sector. In particular, British Telecom has been divested, price-cap regulation has been introduced, a new regulatory institution (Oftel) has been set up (with its Director...

Infrastructure industries-including telecommunications, electricity, water, and gas-underwent massive structural changes in the 1990s. During that decade, hundreds of privatization transactions valued at billions of dollars were completed in these sectors in developing and transition economies....