Following the process initiated by Chile in the early 1980s, most countries in South America have undergone deep transformations in their electric industries. In this new playing field, the comparison of the relative efficiency of several regional monopolies seems to be a potentially valuable...

The paper develops a cost frontier model of gas distribution and estimates it on data for gas distribution companies of Argentina. Efficiency measures are an important tool for regulators, showing how much a firm can rise its output without using more inputs. In Argentina, the Regulatory...

In this paper we use a stochastic frontier approach to analyse the technical change in the post-privatisation period in the gas distribution sector in Argentina. We found that there are both a catching up effect and a shift in the frontier that are showing that the sector as a whole improved its...

There is a growing recognition of the importance of competition for the success of market economies, and of the need for government action both to maintain competition and to regulate industries where competition remains limited. In the area of telecommunications, upon which I shall focus today,...

Worldwide privatization of the telecommunications industry and the introduction of competition in the sector, altogether with the ever-increasing rate of technological advance in telecommunications, raise new and critical challenges for regulation. For matters of pricing, universal service...

This paper describes the procedures established by the present regulation for high-tension network expansions, studies its optimality and points its main problems. According to the present regulatory scheme, the decision to expand the high-tension network system is on the hands of the private...

The main purpose of this paper is to analyze technical change in the electricity distribution sector in South America, in the period 1994-1997. We do so by estimating a Maximum Likelihood stochastic frontier. We found that there is no evidence of catching up effects in the sector during this...

In this paper we describe two of the most used distributions for the inefficiency term in a stochastic frontier: the Half Normal and the Exponential distributions. We then show that both distributions affect the skewness of the composite error term in different ways, which make the Exponential...

The competitive structure of the telecommunication sector is changing all over the world. Competition is being introduced in the long-distance segments while the local markets remain in general under the control of a (group of) regulated monopolies. This paper tries to find the optimal...

The economics rates of return for utility privatization projects in Argentina are very high, wheter or not distributional weights are considered. But there is a very high shadow price for regulatory activity, which tends to be ignored in most privatization exercises. And how serious a government...