In most countries, the state owns the water and hydraulic infrastructure, and public officials decide who gets water rights, how the water is to be used, and how much will be charged for its use. The authors of this paper compare administered systems of water allocation with a system of tradable...

Both consumers and the government benefited from reform of the water system in Conakry, Guinea, whose deterioration since independence had become critical by the mid-1980s. Less than 40 percent of Conakry's population had access to piped water - low even by regional standards - and service was...

International river and lake basins constitute about 47 percent of the world's continental land area, a proportion that increases to about 60 percent in Africa, Asia, and South America. Because water is a scarce and increasingly valuable resource, disputes about water allocation within these...

In the late 1980s, Chile planned to privatize Santiago's sanitary works enterprise (EMOS) but instead reformed it under public ownership. It did so through a regulatory framework that mimicked the design of a concession with a private utility, setting tariffs that ensured at least a seven...

Using data from Pakistan's Punjab, the authors examine monopoly power in the market for groundwater - irrigation water extracted using private tubewells - a market characterized by barriers to entry and spatial fragmentation. Simple theory predicts that tubewell owners should price-discriminate...

As water scarcity and population pressures increase, more countries are adopting water pricing mechanisms, as their primary means of regulating the consumption of irrigation water. The way to allocate water efficiently is to"get the prices right", but how to accomplish this is open to debate....

Piecemeal approaches to river basin development and management may not fully recognize the interactions and interdependence among components of a river basin system. River basin management that focuses on a single water use, on a single sector, or on the supply to particular segment of the basin...

The authors analyze the determinants of the efficiency levels reached by twenty one African water utilities. They assess efficiency through the estimation of a production frontier for the sector in Africa. The efficiency estimates confirm much of the common perceptions from partial productivity...

The signing of a concession contract for the Buenos Aires water and sanitation system in December 1992, attracted worldwide attention, and caused considerable controversy in Argentina. It was one of the world's largest concessions, but the case was also interesting for other reasons. The...