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...

Over the period 1984 to 1987, a major liberalization of restrictive trade policies was implemented in the Moroccan manufacturing sector. The level of imports changed across different industries according to each industry's degree of liberalization. The paper focuses on exploring the distribution...

Data for recent years indicate an acceleration of Chinese industrial growth, from the annual rates of about 10 percent recorded in the quarter century before economic reform to figures approaching 15 percent in the mid- and late 1980s. Evaluating the statistics underlying these reports requires...

Countries sometimes use export controls on raw materials to encourage domestic processing. The motivation is usually to assure raw materials at low prices for domestic industries, although exports are sometimes controlled in an attempt to increase export earnings (by promoting exports of higher...

Little evidence exists on the distribution across countries of toxic releases by manufacturing, or on how those patterns change through time. A number of studies have asked whether environmental controls imposed in the industrialized economies are diverting investments in pollution-intensive...

Increasing urbanization and industrialization can exacerbate pollution problems in developing countries. Tax revenues in developing countries are too low to support adequate infrastructure for treating and disposing of wastes, but the problem is also attributable to the classic problem of...

The authors review the economic principles that should guide the efficient choice of targeted policies for environmental protection. They recommend policy instruments along three dimensions: (1) whether they use economic incentives; (2) whether they target environmental damage directly; and (3)...

Economists have criticized regulations that impose uniform environmental standards on plants that may face different marginal abatement costs and damage functions. Such critics ignore the difference in standard implementation across plants, giving rise to nonuniform standards. The authors...

Deregulation of the U.S. natural gas industry has been under way since the late 1970s. The industry was deregulated to create competitive markets in natural gas and its pipeline transportation, in the expectation that competition would guide transactions toward a more efficient outcome. The...

The authors discuss when and how to adjust expenditures derived from household surveys to reflect the consumption of basic services. They discuss simple adjustment methods for markets that are subsidized, rationed, or subject to increasing marginal tariff pricing. Using Ecuador as an example,...