Each year developing countries seek billions of dollars of investment in their infrastructure, and private investors, mostly in rich countries, seek places to invest trillions of dollars of new savings. Private foreign investment in the infrastructure of developing countries would seem to hold...

This Note compares the effects of price cap and rate-of-return regulation on the risk borne by regulated utilities. It present evidence that price cap regulation subjects firms to greater risks and therefore raises their cost of capital. This result has one clear implication: firms regulated by...

Governments often regulate not only the overall level of prices charged by infrastructure firms but also the relationship between prices for different services or customers. Prices can differ among different types of customers, even when no customers can be said to be subsidizing another, for...

The authors propose a number of privatization rules to ensure that management will improve after privatization. Governments should ensure that the privatized sector has several firms operating in industries that are local natural monopolies, so that if one operator goes bankrupt, another can...

The water industry differs in two key respects from such other network industries as gas, electricity, and telecommunications. First, it offers fewer opportunities for competition among suppliers, since the network of pipes accounts for a large part of the total cost of water and can be run...

Many private infrastructure projects mix regulation that subjects the private company to considerable risk, a government or regulator that is reluctant to see the company go bankrupt, and high leverage on the part of the company. If all goes well, equityholders make a profit, debtholders are...

When growth-promoting spending is cut so much that the present value of future government revenues falls by more than the immediate improvement in the cash deficit, fiscal adjustment becomes like walking up the down escalator. Although short-term cash flows matter, too tight a focus on them...

Public-private partnerships (PPPs) operate at the boundary of the public and private sectors, being neither fully public nor fully private. PPPs are defined in this paper as privately financed infrastructure projects in which a private firm either: (i) sells its services to the government; or...

When governments seek private investment in infrastructure projects, they usually find themselves asked to provide grants, guarantees, or other forms of fiscal support. Often they prefer to provide support in ways that limit immediate cash expenditure but sometimes generate large costs later....