The authors look at the rise of the Internet as the main application behind the emerging global information infrastructure. Many now believe that the Internet provides a window into a future in which access to information will be independent of geographic location and interactivity in a...

Do the timing and type of auction affect the sale price? What kind of restructuring is worth doing before privatization? The author examines how much these and other factors affect privatization prices. The study shows that speed and competitive bidding consistently increase sale premiums, but...

Critics of privatization often argue that its benefits come at a high cost to society. The authors test the validity of this criticism for Mexico's privatization program, one of the world's largest case-by-case programs. Assessing the performance of newly privatized firms in such areas as...

The authors argue that mass privatization in the Czech Republic has spurred enterprise restructuring and that investment funds have played a key part in this outcome. Using 1992-95 data for more than 700 Czech firms, the authors find strong positive relationships between ownership concentration...

In 1989, the United Kingdom embarked on one of the first modern privatizations in the water sector, selling assets under license and setting up an independent economic regulator. An important regulatory innovation is its use of price caps and yardstick competition. The author highlights two...

The authors attribute many of the problems in highway privatization to the combined effect of features of the highway business and the fixed term contracts used. First, traffic forecasts are notoriously imprecise, and the franchise holder has almost no control over demand. Second, most...

Like the model adopted by many Asian countries, the Colombian approach to private participation in infrastructure aims to attract project financing for new facilities, leaving most existing assets in state hands. While the approach has been successful on attracting substantial private capital to...

In 1989, the Argentine government initiated rapid privatization of infrastructure services-mainly gas, telecoms, electricity generation and transmission, and water and electricity distribution in the Buenos Aires metropolitan area. The author reviews the performance of the agencies set up to...

Investment funds play a key role in mass privatization in many transition economies. But have they lived up to expectations? The authors look at that question in the two earliest and best-known cases--Russia and the Czech Republic. The evidence is discouraging. It appears that the funds have...

Chile's telecommunications market is one of the most open and competitive in the world. Nevertheless, about 10 percent of all Chileans that live in localities do not even have a public telephone. To increase access to public telephones in rural and low-income urban areas, the Chilean government...