This cross-country evaluation of institutional responses to problems in the water sector shows that changes in the nature of water problems have changed the development paradigm underlying water institutions. There is increasing recognition of how decentralized allocation mechanisms can...

Introducing private sector participation (PSP) into the water and sewerage sectors in developing countries is difficult and controversial. Empirical studies on its effects are scant and generally inconclusive. Case studies tend to find improvements in the sector following privatization, but they...

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...

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...

International river and lake basins constitute about 47 percent of the world's continental land area, a proportion that increases to about 60 percent in Africa, Asia, and South America. Because water is a scarce and increasingly valuable resource, disputes about water allocation within these...

In the late 1980s, Chile planned to privatize Santiago's sanitary works enterprise (EMOS) but instead reformed it under public ownership. It did so through a regulatory framework that mimicked the design of a concession with a private utility, setting tariffs that ensured at least a seven...

In designing a rational scheme for subsidizing water services, it is important to support the choice of design parameters with empirical analysis that stimulates the impact of subsidy options on the target population. Otherwise, there is little guarantee that the subsidy program will meet its...

The environment and security literature has argued that freshwater scarcity often leads to inter-state conflict, and possibly acute violence. The contention, however, ignores the long history of hydro-political cooperation exemplified by hundreds of documented agreements. Building on a theory...

The authors focus on policy interventions for improving irrigation water allocation decisions by including both macro and micro considerations in a unified analytical computable general equilibrium (CGE) framework. The approach is demonstrated, using the case of Morocco, by analyzing selected...

The world is entering a period of intense competition for limited supplies of water for alternative uses - in agriculture, in urban and industrial supplies, for recreation, by wildlife, for human consumption, and to maintain environmental quality. Manifestations of this competition and our...