Fiscal adjustment becomes like walking up the down escalator when growth-promoting spending is cut so much as to lower growth and thus the present value of future tax revenues to a degree that more than offsets the improvement in the cash deficit. Although short-term cash flows matter, a...

Output-based payments are an important tool of government policy. Sometimes governments offer "output-based aid" to subsidize services sold to households. Because output-based payments are tied to the delivery of outputs, they have an obvious advantage over input-based payments. In agreeing to...

Each year developing countries seek billions of dollars of investment in their infrastructure, and private investors, mostly in rich countries, seek places to invest trillions of dollars of new savings. Private foreign investment in the infrastructure of developing countries would seem to hold...

This Note compares the effects of price cap and rate-of-return regulation on the risk borne by regulated utilities. It present evidence that price cap regulation subjects firms to greater risks and therefore raises their cost of capital. This result has one clear implication: firms regulated by...

Governments often regulate not only the overall level of prices charged by infrastructure firms but also the relationship between prices for different services or customers. Prices can differ among different types of customers, even when no customers can be said to be subsidizing another, for...

The authors propose a number of privatization rules to ensure that management will improve after privatization. Governments should ensure that the privatized sector has several firms operating in industries that are local natural monopolies, so that if one operator goes bankrupt, another can...

The water industry differs in two key respects from such other network industries as gas, electricity, and telecommunications. First, it offers fewer opportunities for competition among suppliers, since the network of pipes accounts for a large part of the total cost of water and can be run...

Government guarantees can help persuade private investors to finance valuable new infrastructure. But because their costs are hard to estimate and usually do not show up in the government's accounts, governments can be tempted to grant too many guarantees. Drawing on a diverse range of...

The chapters in this book examine the data on infrastructure and the poor in developing countries and consider how policies centered on private provision can address their needs. Many of the chapters focus on the extent to which the poor have access to infrastructure services of reasonable...

When governments seek private investment in infrastructure projects, they usually find themselves asked to provide grants, guarantees, or other forms of fiscal support. Often they prefer to provide support in ways that limit immediate cash expenditure but sometimes generate large costs later....