As private firms become increasingly involved in the development of key infrastructure, redefining the role of government from that of serviceprovider to regulator presents both challenges and opportunities. The factors that give rise to sector reforms color how much policymakers invest in...

The question of the most effective order of reforming state-owned enterprises has been hotly debated over the years. In the early 1990s, many western advisers encouraged Eastern European countries, and the former Soviet Union, to privatize firms quickly under the assumption that market...

The past two decades have seen an unparalleled rise in new health, safety, and environmental regulation in industrial countries. At the same time, insome countries there has been substantial economic deregulation of several industries (including airlines, railroads, trucking, energy,...

The authors construct a regulation model in which renegotiation occurs due to the imperfect enforcement of concession contracts. This enables the authors to provide theoretical predictions for the impact on the probability of renegotiation of a concession, regulatory institutions, institutional...

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...

The Jamaican telecommunications sector today is much more dynamic than it was before and provides much better service. There is widespread skepticism about the current regulatory framework, which is criticized for encouraging a tight telecommunications monopoly, little administrative discretion,...

This paper analyzes Senegal's experience with telecommunications liberalization and privatization. Senegal privatized its incumbent operator in 1997, and granted the newly privatized firm seven years of fixed-line exclusivity while introducing"managed competition"in the cellular market and free...

The author addresses the puzzle of sluggish investment in the Philippines'dominant telecommunications firm, PLDT. This case allows a study of the underlying causes of success or failure in a privately owned infrastructure sector in a developing country. Since its inception, PLDT has been...