This paper presents a basic assessment of the financial performance of infrastructure service operators in developing countries. It relies on a new database of 120 companies put together to track the evolution...
The authors make the case for the return of regulation in the organization of urban bus services in developing countries. During the past three decades urban public transport policy has gone through several...
Twenty years ago, as the United Kingdom was getting ready to launch the privatization of its public services, Professor Littlechild developed and operationalized the concept of price caps as a regulatory...
This book is intended to help regulators learn about the tools needed to measure efficiency. It is based on lecture notes from courses the World Bank Institute offers in English, French and Spanish throughout...
The most effective regulators in developing countries are following remarkably similar approaches. The main common element across "best practice" countries is the use of relatively simple quantitative...
This book is intended to help regulators learn about the tools needed to measure efficiency. It is based on lecture notes from courses the World Bank Institute offers in English, French and Spanish throughout...
A decade long experience shows that monitoring the performance of public and private monopolies in South America is proving to be the hard part of the reform process. The operators who control most of...
The authors analyze the determinants of the efficiency levels reached by twenty one African water utilities. They assess efficiency through the estimation of a production frontier for the sector in Africa...
The authors review the stylized facts on regulatory reform in telecommunications and its effects on telecommunications development and Internet penetration in Latin America. Relying on data from the International...
The authors analyze the possibility of tradeoffs between efficiency and equity as well as the possibility of distributional conflicts in the context of renegotiation of infrastructure contracts in developing...
Almost a decade after Argentina began privatizing its railways, resolution of conflicts between regulators, users, and operators continues to take longer, and to be more difficult, than expected. The authors...
The authors show how relatively standard methodologies can help to measure the efficiency gains from reforming the organization of port infrastructure, how those measures can be used to promote competition...
One of the most complex challenges of infrastructure privatization is its impact on employment. Often (but not always) private operators' main approach to cost-cutting is labor reduction. Private operators...
Forecasting has long been a challenge, and will remain so for the foreseeable future. But the analytical instruments and data processing capabilities available through the latest technology, and software...
The link between economic growth, and better provision of infrastructure services may be unproven, but it is clear that reforms to make infrastructure services more competitive (where possible), and to...
Efforts to reform utilities can affect poor households in varied, often complex, ways, but it is by no means certain that such reform will hurt vulnerable households. Many myths have been perpetuated in...
Recent developments in emerging financial markets have dramatically changed the appetite for (and terms of) transport infrastructure projects. As a result of defaults in Asia and Russia and devaluations...
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...
Road transport has long been the dominant form of transport for freight and passenger movement throughout the world. Because most road projects require investments with long amortization periods and because...
When Argentina initiated reform of its transport sector in 1989, it had few models to follow. It was the first Latin American country to privatize its intercity railroad, to explicitly organize intraport...