Government guarantees can help persuade private investors to finance valuable new infrastructure. But because their costs are hard to estimate and usually do not show up in the government's accounts, governments can be tempted to grant too many guarantees. Drawing on a diverse range of...

The book considers when governments should give guarantees to private investors. After describing the history of guarantees, and the challenges the politics and psychology create for good decisions, the book sets out principles for allocating risk (and therefore guarantees), techniques for...

Government guarantees can help persuade private investors to finance valuable new infrastructure. But because their costs are hard to estimate and usually do not show up in the government's accounts, governments can be tempted to grant too many guarantees. Drawing on a diverse range of...

This note discusses what finance ministries can do to ensure that public-private partnerships (PPPs) are used wisely. By inviting private participation in infrastructure development and service provision, PPPs can help improve public services. Yet, strong governance institutions are needed to...

Each year developing countries seek billions of dollars of investment in their infrastructure, and private investors, mostly in rich countries, seek places to invest trillions of dollars of new savings. Private foreign investment in the infrastructure of developing countries would seem to hold...

This Note compares the effects of price cap and rate-of-return regulation on the risk borne by regulated utilities. It present evidence that price cap regulation subjects firms to greater risks and therefore raises their cost of capital. This result has one clear implication: firms regulated by...