The extent to which social protection programmes in general, and targeted programmes in particular, actually alleviate poverty has been a central issue in development debates for decades. The objective of this article is to contribute to the debate by empirically examining the...

The past decade has witnessed the emergence of many technologies that have the potential to fundamentally alter our economic, social, and indeed personal lives. The problems they pose are in many ways unprecedented, posing serious challenges for policymakers. How should governments respond to...

The authors address the question of infrastructure reforms in a novel way by focusing on the impact which they can have on consumers through the prices paid by different groups and on their access to the networks. They analyse original material from four Latin American countries –...

This paper presents a global perspective on infrastructure coverage and the poor that many people will think they have seen before but they have not. In this paper they introduce a new data source for infrastructure statistics, the World Bank's Living Standards Measurement Study (LSMS)....

Deregulation and its Discontents examines the different ways in which the issues related to deregulation and reregulation have been addressed in Asia. The role of government in business has gone through distinct, if overlapping, cycles: regulation, deregulation and reregulation. However, little...

In February 1997, Maynilad Water Services, Inc. and the Manila Water Company, Inc. were awarded concession contracts from Manila's Metropolitan Waterworks and Sewerage System (MWSS) and split between them the service areas in Metro Manila. In the years thereafter, the paths taken by the two...

While the contemporary literature on diversification from a resource perspective builds upon Penrose's (1959) idea of excess firm capabilities, the focus has been on the applicability of resources across domains. Making a clear analytical distinction between scale-free capabilities and those...