In 1989 the government of Guinea enacted far-reaching reform of its water sector, which had been dominated by a poorly run public agency. The government signed a lease contract for operations and maintenance with a private operator, making a separate public enterprise responsible for ownershipof...

Compared with other urban water systems in West Africa, the water supply system in Abidjan performs very well. Documenting the recent history of that system, the authors try to answer three questions: What motivated reform in a system that was already performing well? How and why did the reform...

This paper emphasizes the central role of arrangements called “hybrids” in the organization of production and distribution in market economies. Several forms are taken into account, such as subcontracting, supply-chain systems, distribution networks, franchising, partnerships, alliances, or...

Institutional reforms and their contribution to development and growth have been a source of renewed interest as well as of many challenges over the last two decades. Identifying the forces that push towards reform and the conditions that determine the success or failure of reforms, building...

How are extra costs resulting from the occurrence of unanticipated risks allocated in a procurement setting? This paper develops a theoretical framework combining transaction cost economics with equity theory in order to explain why parties endorse cooperative strategies, basically a 50-50...

Both consumers and the government benefited from reform of the water system in Conakry, Guinea, whose deterioration since independence had become critical by the mid-1980s. Less than 40 percent of Conakry's population had access to piped water - low even by regional standards - and service was...