Economic history has become an increasingly broad discipline, after a temporary narrowing following the cliometric revolution of the mid-twentieth century. Increasingly sophisticated econometric techniques are used to capture the institutional detail involved in the dynamics of historical...

Nearly 40% of England's privately built waterworks were municipalised in the late 19th century. We examine how this affected public health by pairing annual mortality data for over 600 registration districts, spanning 1869 to 1910, with detailed waterworks information. Identification is aided by...

Using data from 270 water and sanitation providers, this Note investigates the relationship between a utility's size and its operating costs. The current trend toward transferring responsibility for providing services to the municipal level is driven in part by the assumption that this will make...

This note, based on the World Bank's Private Participation in Infrastructure (PPI) project database, reviews trends in infrastructure projects with private participation in low-income countries. Four main conclusions arise. Surprisingly, the proportion of countries with at least one project -...

This note focuses on rail projects with private participation, that reached financial closure in 1990-1997, surveying regional trends, types of private participation, and project size. Through database analysis, the paper reveals that operations, and management contracts - including leases and...