A growing number of communities across the United States are adopting policies to promote advanced telecommunication services, including broadband access. This paper offers a taxonomy for classifying these local government initiatives and provides preliminary empirical results for a sample of...

Municipal electric utilities (MEUs) are increasingly expanding into telecommunications services. Such entry is interesting in several respects. First, MEUs marry two potential pathways for the growth of telecommunications access infrastructure and services: public ownership of last-mile...

The Tennessee Valley Authority, as a federal corporation governed independently by a three-person board, undertook excessive investments in the 1980s based on erroneous projections of technology and demand growth for electricity. These capital outlays have been financed to pay back loans on...

Should taxpayers finance government entry into an increasingly competitive, but technologically volatile, business market? The city of Philadelphia has just released a blueprint to provide a taxpayer-backed city-wide wi-fi service, under the rationale that broadband should be treated as a vital...

The issue of rural communication development has been conventionally examined under labels such as universal service, digital, divide, broadband deployment, and E-Government, which generally fall into two seemingly distinct categories - access and applications. In China, these concepts are...

Political and economic reforms in India have made private sector participation (PSP) in urban water delivery a viable strategy for state and city policy, against the expectations of many scholars. This paper provides a comprehensive analysis of the development of temporal, geographic and...

The plan announced last week in Philadelphia to create a government-owned wireless broadband network isn't needed, is economically and technologically unsound and will put the city's taxpayers at great financial risk. The Wireless Philadelphia Business Plan promises (1) ubiquitous broadband...

The degree of liberalization in OECD electricity markets varies considerably across countries. Commonly explained by diverging economic performances, corruption levels or government ideologies, this paper suggest another potential reason for cross-national differences in market reforms: given...

Independent regulatory authorities are a basic prerequisite for a successful liberalization process. However, contrary to what is expected, both graphical analyses and OLS regressions for a small sample of electricity and gas regulators operating in 16 European countries reveal a negative...