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...

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...

Almost a decade after Argentina began privatizing its railways, resolution of conflicts between regulators, users, and operators continues to take longer, and to be more difficult, than expected. The authors contend that many of these conflicts arose because there are no rules for interactions...

The authors provide empirical evidence on the impact that private participation in infrastructure has had on key macroeconomic variables in a sample of 21 Latin American countries from 1985-98. Specifically, they look at the effects on GDP per capita, current public expenditures, public...

This paper shows empirically that"privatization"in the energy, telecommunications, and water sectors, and the introduction of independent regulators in those sectors, have not always had the expected effects on access, affordability, or quality of services. It also shows that corruption leads to...

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...

This book is intended to help regulators learn about the tools needed to measure efficiency. It is based on lecture notes from courses the World Bank Institute offers in English, French and Spanish throughout the developing world and has benefited from feedback received during those courses. It...

This paper summarizes the evidence on the evolution of transport PPPs over the last 15 years or so. In the process, it provides a primer on the associated policy issues, including of the central role of project finance in the implementation of PPP policies and the debates on risk allocation in...

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...