Performance monitoring based on outputs (customers served, volume delivered, and service quality) has characterized oversight agencies in the water sector. However, Micromanagement and burdensome reporting schemes can curtail operational innovation and creativity. However, in situations where...

Uganda's national water utility has become known for its successful turnaround under public management. Less well known is that this success owes much to the introduction of private-sector-like practices to motivate employees. Following a mixed experience with two short-term management contracts...

The achievement of Millennium Development Goals (MGDs) by 2015 requires significant managerial innovation and creativity, especially in low-income countries where utility inefficiencies are still prevalent. This paper describes approaches that have been used in Uganda's National Water and...

Water service to the urban poor presents challenges to political leaders, regulators and managers. We identify technology mixes of yard taps, public water points (with and without pre-paid meters) to meet alternative constraints, and reflecting populations served and investment requirements....

This paper evaluates regulation by contract in public-private partnerships (PPPs) in infrastructure services. Although the benefits of competition for the market and of regulatory contracts are widely acknowledged, the literature indentifies several failures in their design. These ‘flaws’...

This paper performs a literature update of quantitative studies of water and sanitation services (WSS). There are 190 studies which use cost or production functions to evaluate the performance of WSS utilities. The studies examine (1) the scale, scope or density economies of utilities in a...

This paper examines how government regulation in developing countries affects the form of corruption between business customers and service providers in the telecom sector. We match the World Bank enterprise-level data on bribes with a unique cross-country telecom regulation dataset collected by...