With urban and especially periurban populations set to grow at unprecedented rates in Africa, and service coverage continuing to lag, governments and donors have begun to recognize that small-scale providers have an increasingly critical role to play. They have also begun to focus on the...

This paper summarizes the key findings and conclusions of a literature review of small-scale private service providers (SPSPs) of water supply and electricity conducted over a six-month period in 2003. It draws on more than 400 documents-including journals, articles, reports, case studies and...

This paper summarizes the key findings and conclusions of a literature review of small-scale private service providers (SPSPs) of water supply and electricity conducted over a six-month period in 2003. It draws on more than 400 documents - including journals, articles, reports, case studies and...

Programs to reform urban utilities and to engage the private sector have tended to focus on large cities and on transactions with large foreign private operators. This is changing, as smaller towns and cities are growing rapidly in many developing countries. Concurrently, decentralization is...

In Africa, Asia, and Latin America, the number of towns and their populations are expected to double within 15 years, and again within 30. Already, one-third of Africans and Asians live in towns of 2,000 to 200,000 people. This rapid urbanization makes improving water supply and sanitation...

We assembled a large panel of project-level technical and financial data and country-level economic, institutional, political, and governance variables to assess the determinants of private financing of infrastructure in emerging markets and developing economies. Controlling for economic...

We developed a technical efficiency analysis of container ports in Latin America and the Caribbean using an input-oriented stochastic frontier model. We employed a 10-year panel with data on container throughput, port terminal area, berth length, and number of available cranes in 63 ports. The...

This chapter reviews the empirical literature on the determinants of private participation in infrastructure investments and presents a more detailed discussion of the political, institutional, and governance determinants. It also identifies areas in which additional efforts are required if the...