The main reason Lima failed to implement a concession was geographical: the scarcity of water sources meant high marginal costs, partly for pumping water from deep wells and building adequate storage for dry periods. High extraction costs were compounded by years of neglect; much of the system...

In the late 1980s, Chile planned to privatize Santiago's sanitary works enterprise (EMOS) but instead reformed it under public ownership. It did so through a regulatory framework that mimicked the design of a concession with a private utility, setting tariffs that ensured at least a seven...

Although theoretical models make distinct predictions about the relationship between financial sector development and income inequality, little empirical research has been conducted to compare their relative explanatory power. The authors examine the relation between financial intermediary...

Performance contracts are widely used to reform state-owned enterprises. By June 1994, there were 565 such contracts in 32 developing countries, used prinicipally to reform large utilities and other monopolies, and roughly another 103,000 in China, where they are also used to reform state...

Infrastructure industries-including telecommunications, electricity, water, and gas-underwent massive structural changes in the 1990s. During that decade, hundreds of privatization transactions valued at billions of dollars were completed in these sectors in developing and transition economies....

Using a large panel dataset of Chinese industrial firms, the authors examine the determinants of access to loans from formal financial intermediaries and extension of trade credit. Poorly performing state-owned enterprises were more likely to redistribute credit to firms with less privileged...

Over the past few years, many studies have looked at the macroeconomic, cultural, and institutional determinants of corruption. This study complements these cross-country studies by focusing on microeconomic factors that affect bribes paid in a single sector of the economy. Using...

In 1980, China's government owned and controlled its state enterprises, which were managed (inefficiently) by bureaucrats. During the 1980s, the government experimented with decentralizing state enterprises to boost productivity. By decade's end, China's state enterprises had become more...

The empirical literature on the effects of ownership has not distinguished between the effects of ownership and the effects of control. It has also generally ignored the dynamic effects of various ownership and control rights. Using a rich set of panel data about changes in China's state-owned...

The importance of a country's"investment climate"for economic growth has recently received much attention. The authors address the general lack of appropriate data for measuring the investment climate and its effects. The authors use a new survey of 1,500 Chinese enterprises in five cities to...