This note provides a snapshot as of 2004 of the share of countries with an independent regulatory agency and with at least some private sector financing of its sectoral investment needs for electricity, water and sanitation, and telecommunications. Among other things, they show that: For...

Limited competition has been a serious concern in infrastructure procurement. Importantly, however, there are normally a number of potential bidders initially showing interest in proposed projects. This paper focuses on tackling the question why these initially interested bidders fade out. An...

Worldwide privatization of the telecommunications industry, and the introduction of competition in the sector, together with the ever-increasing rate of technological advance in telecommunications, raise new and critical challenges for regulation. Fo matters of pricing, universal service...

The authors explore the relation between the establishment of a regulatory agency and the performance of the electricity sector. The authors exploit a unique dataset comprising firm-level information on a representative sample of 220 electric utilities from 51 development and transition...

The purpose of this paper is to provide a quantitative assessment of the degree of concentration in infrastructure industries at the regional and global levels. We calculate regional and global concentration indexes for electricity generation and distribution, water and sanitation, and fixed and...

Infrastructure is essential for economic growth, and public procurement is an important instrument to use limited resources effectively. Among public procurers there remains a strong view that quality should not be compromised, particularly in high-value transactions, such as infrastructure...

We study a political system in which voters can optimally pick between political platforms, but cannot screen the quality of individual politicians associated with these platforms. A bad individual achievement can correspond to either incompetence (adverse selection) or corruption (moral...

In a model of horizontal matching on the labor market, we show that increasing workers’ bargaining power may increase some employers’ incentive to switch to new production activities. In particular, this could lead to (i) higher wages, (ii) more jobs, (iii) better jobs and (iv) higher...