In the United States the courts have long been involved in the oversight of regulators. In the United Kingdom, which created its utility regulators from scratch in the 1980s, an alternative system was sought. This system centers on three concerns: the procedure followed by the regulator, the...

This paper examines the increasing participation of the private sector in the transmission and distribution of natural gas in developing countries during the 1990s, resulting mainly from the growing demand for new gas transport facilities coinciding with a growing consensus in favor of private...

Bolivia is one of a growing number of developing countries turning to the private sector to improve urban water and sanitation services. The country's first major contract in the sector, a twenty-five-year concession for the neighboring cities of La Paz and El Alto, was implemented in August...

To help address a budgetary crisis in early 1995, the Rio de Janeiro state government began reforms aimed at selling or concessioning to the private sector loss-making state-owned enterprises. In the transport sector this meant selling or concessioning subway, commuterrail, bus, and ferry...

In 1995, as the interim agreements between the Palestine Liberation Organization and Israel were signed, water and sanitation services in the Gaza Strip were in crisis. In mid-1996 Lyonnaise des Eaux/Khatib and Alami (LEKA) was awarded a four-year water services management contract to help local...

So far gas market liberalization has generally occurred in mature markets-particularly where much of the pipeline system has already been laid, as in Argentina, Britain, and the United States. In these cases a competitive structure is appropriate. In new markets, however, it may be difficult to...

Scandinavia, where countries have traded power for decades, has the world's most developed international market for electricity. Recently the trading system has changed dramatically, moving from the old model of cooperation among the leading vertically integrated utilities in each country, under...

A study of the five countries most affected by the East Asian financial crisis - Indonesia, the Republic of Korea, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Thailand -- shows that more than 60 percent of firms are illiquid and 30 percent are technically insolvent. Among solvent firms, about half are at...

When state-owned enterprises preparing for privatization have very high levels of redundant workers and when social safety nets and redundancy provisions in labor laws are inadequate or lacking, the political and social implications of layoffs mean that the government should be involved in the...

Restructuring Ukraine's coal industry has been even more difficult and politicized than reforming its electricity and gas industries. Coal reform has divided Parliament and the government into two camps - one supporting populist policies and the other supporting fiscal realism - and the balance...