Reform of the water, electricity, and telecommunications sectors is gathering momentum in nearly all developing countries. Reform should include an assessment of whether subsidies are necessary and if so, how to design subsidies that reach their intended beneficiaries accurately and do not...

Direct subsidies are an increasingly popular means of making infrastructure services more affordable to the poor. Under the direct subsidy approach, governments pay part of the water bill of poor households that meet certain criteria. This approach was first used in water sector reforms in Chile...

Utility subsidies to consumers of water and electricity services are often justified as a mechanism for making services affordable for the poor. After all, an estimated 1.1 billion people in the developing world lack access to safe water, 2 billion are without electricity, and 2.4 billion...

While consumer utility subsidies are widespread in both the water and electricity sectors, their effectiveness in reaching and distributing resources to the poor is the subject of much debate. This publication brings together empirical evidence on subsidy performance across a wide range of...

Subsidies to residential utility customers are popular among policymakers, utility managers, and utility customers alike, but they are nonetheless the subject of much controversy. Utility subsidies are seen as a way to help make utility service affordable for poor households and as an...

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 phases. The 1980s and 1990s were characterized by liberalization of the sector from...

Subsidy policies on public urban transport have been adopted ubiquitously. In both developed and developing countries, subsidies are implemented to make transport more affordable. Despite their widespread implementation, there are virtually no quantitative assessments of their distributional...

In 1995 the Mexican government initiated structural reform of the natural gas sector-reform that permitted private investment in transportation, storage, distribution, trade and marketing while maintaining a State monopoly in production. It prepared a detailed regulatory framework to implement...

This Live Wire-based on Off the Books: Understanding and Mitigating the Fiscal Risks of Infrastructure (2023)-presents a systematic assessment of the magnitude and prevalence of fiscal risks from power investments and their root causes across a range of low- and middle-income countries. Drawing...

China and Africa have a long history of political and economic ties, which have greatly intensified in recent years. Both bilateral trade and Chinese foreign direct investment (FDI) in Africa grew about fourfold between 2001 and 2005, accompanied by a major influx of Chinese enterprises and...