Basic services are essential to reducing poverty and improving quality of life. This working paper focuses on health, education, energy and water. These services contribute to achieving the Millennium Development Goals, as well as being goals in themselves. Over the past twenty years or so, the...

This article examines the effects on poverty of privatization, an impact to which donors have given little attention in their concern with efficiency and markets. The analysis of the distributional impact of privatization activities draws on empirical cases in the utilities sector in a wide...