Women's economic empowerment is not a new issue; nevertheless, it continues to challenge governments and development assistance agencies. One of the reasons for this hurdle may well be that gender advocates and growth devotees are speaking different languages when there is a huge space for them...

The authors summarize the main lessons emerging from Argentina's experience, including universal service obligations in concession contracts. They discuss free-riding risks, moral hazard problems, and other issues that arise when social concerns are delegated to private operators. After...

The main purpose of this paper is to argue that the optimal design of regulation of water and sanitation monopolies should be the outcome of a detailed diagnostic of the institutional constraints impacting the ability of the operator -- whether public or private -- to deliver the services....

The authors assess the effects of private capital and independent regulatory agencies on telecommunications performance by using cross-country panel data from 1990 to 2003. In general, they find that having independent regulatory agencies positively affects affordability and labor productivity,...

Da Silva, Estache, and Jarvela describe the evolution of the financing structure of regulated privatized utilities and transport companies. To do so, they rely on a sample of 121 utilities distributed over 16 countries, and 23 transport infrastructure operators and 23 transport services...

This paper summarizes the evidence on the evolution of transport PPPs over the last 15 years or so. In the process, it provides a primer on the associated policy issues, including of the central role of project finance in the implementation of PPP policies and the debates on risk allocation in...

In the 1980s, cotton production in sub - Saharan Africa expanded significantly. Annual production growth averaged 4.7 percent between 1980 and 1990, compared with only 1.2 percent for 1964-79. At the same time, cotton exports grew an average 8 percent a year, compared with almost no growth...

Multidimensional auctions are a natural and practical solution when auctioneers pursue more than one objective in their public-private-partnership transactions. However, it is difficult to achieve auction efficiency with multiple award criteria. Using auction data from road and railway...

All interested parties seem to agree that it is important to be able to monitor public sector performance at the sectoral level, but most current work based on multi-country databases does not lend itself to country-specific conclusions. This is due to a large extent to major data limitations...

This paper shows empirically that privatization in the energy, telecommunications, and water sectors, and the introduction of independent regulators in those sectors, have not always had the expected effects on access, affordability, or quality of services. It also shows that corruption leads to...