Efforts to reform utilities can affect poor households in varied, often complex, ways, but it is by no means certain that such reform will hurt vulnerable households. Many myths have been perpetuated in discussions of utility reform - and in many cases poor households have benefited from reform....

In designing a rational scheme for subsidizing water services, it is important to support the choice of design parameters with empirical analysis that stimulates the impact of subsidy options on the target population. Otherwise, there is little guarantee that the subsidy program will meet its...

To increase investment in infrastructure, in the early 1990s Chile's government introduced private capital into the transport infrastructure sector, covering roads and highways, bridges, tunnels, and airports. The chosen mechanism: a concession scheme through which private firms would finance...

The authors provide an empirical analysis of the determinants of three child-health outcomes related to the Millennium Development Goals: the infant mortality rate, the child mortality rate, and the prevalence of malnutrition. Using data from Demographic and Health Surveys, they go beyond...

This paper investigates the effects of political (mis)alignment on public service delivery when mandates are shared between state and local governments. We analyze sewage treatment policies in the state of São Paulo, Brazil. Relying on difference-in-differences estimations, we establish a...

Twenty years ago, as the United Kingdom was getting ready to launch the privatization of its public services, Professor Littlechild developed and operationalized the concept of price caps as a regulatory regime to control for residual monopoly conditions in those services. Ten years later, Latin...

The link between economic growth, and better provision of infrastructure services may be unproven, but it is clear that reforms to make infrastructure services more competitive (where possible), and to provide strong, and independent economic regulation of natural monopolies, do create an...

Forecasting has long been a challenge, and will remain so for the foreseeable future. But the analytical instruments and data processing capabilities available through the latest technology, and software, should allow much better forecasting than transport ministries, or regulatory agencies...

The author reviews the recent economic research on emerging issues for infrastructure policies affecting poor people in developing countries. His main purpose is to identify some of the challenges the international community, and donors in particular, are likely to have to address over the next...

Estache and Rossi estimate a stochastic costs frontier for a sample of Asian and Pacific water companies, comparing the performance of public and privatized companies based on detailed firm-specific information published by the Asian Development Bank in 1997. They find private operators of water...