Reforming Infrastructure

Reforming Infrastructure
Author: Ioannis Nicolaos Kessides
Publisher: World Bank Publications
Total Pages: 328
Release: 2004
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN:

Electricity, natural gas, telecommunications, railways, and water supply, are often vertically and horizontally integrated state monopolies. This results in weak services, especially in developing and transition economies, and for poor people. Common problems include low productivity, high costs, bad quality, insufficient revenue, and investment shortfalls. Many countries over the past two decades have restructured, privatized and regulated their infrastructure. This report identifies the challenges involved in this massive policy redirection. It also assesses the outcomes of these changes, as well as their distributional consequences for poor households and other disadvantaged groups. It recommends directions for future reforms and research to improve infrastructure performance, identifying pricing policies that strike a balance between economic efficiency and social equity, suggesting rules governing access to bottleneck infrastructure facilities, and proposing ways to increase poor people's access to these crucial services.

Privatization

Privatization
Author: John Vickers
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 476
Release: 1988
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9780262720113

The process of selling assests and enterprises to the private sector raises questions about natural monopolies, the efficiency and equity of state-owned versus privately owned enterprises, and industrial policy. This comprehensive analysis of the British privatization program explores these questions both theoretically and empirically.

Privatisation, Competition and Regulation

Privatisation, Competition and Regulation
Author: OECD
Publisher: OECD Publishing
Total Pages: 216
Release: 2000-02-08
Genre:
ISBN: 9264180583

This volume brings together a number of papers discussing the interrelationship among privatisation, competition and regulation. The papers make reference to the experience of different countries with privatisation in a wide range of infrastructure sectors.

Corporate Governance A Policy Maker's Guide to Privatisation

Corporate Governance A Policy Maker's Guide to Privatisation
Author: OECD
Publisher: OECD Publishing
Total Pages: 110
Release: 2019-03-21
Genre:
ISBN: 9264402780

Policy makers and privatisation experts agree that it is critical to “get privatisation right.” A well-planned and executed transaction, backed by sound rationales, institutional and regulatory arrangements, good governance, and integrity can have consequences on future divestment activity by enhancing investor confidence while gaining the support of stakeholders and the public.

International Handbook on Privatization

International Handbook on Privatization
Author: David Parker
Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing
Total Pages: 626
Release: 2003-01-01
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1781950954

Privatization has dominated industrial restructuring programs since the 1980s and continues to do so. This authoritative and accessible Handbook considers all aspects of this key issue, including: the theory of privatization; privatization in transition, developed and developing economies; as well the economic regulation of privatized industries.

Privatisation and the Creation of a Market-Based Legal System

Privatisation and the Creation of a Market-Based Legal System
Author: Bahaa Ali El-Dean
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 326
Release: 2002
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 9789004125803

This Volume aims to provide an analysis of problems and challenges relating to the creation of a legal infrastructure that meets the needs and capabilities of emerging market economies in the light of the privatisation process.

Competition, Regulation and the Privatisation of British Rail

Competition, Regulation and the Privatisation of British Rail
Author: John Shaw
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 229
Release: 2020-12-14
Genre:
ISBN: 9781138738249

This title was first published in 2000. This work looks at the privatization of British Rail. It covers the competition for franchises and the regulation of those franchises. The aim of this study was to evaluate the extent to which the promotion of competition was an appropriate policy goal in the privatization of British rail. The book examines the rail system as a whole and looks at the prospects for the future.

Privatisation, Competition and Regulation

Privatisation, Competition and Regulation
Author: Stephen C. Littlechild
Publisher:
Total Pages: 58
Release: 2000
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN:

Austrian economists regard utilities as exceptional cases where regulation may be justified. The long term aim for a public utility should be to '...turn as much as possible of that industry into a private, competitive and unregulated industry'. In the short term this may mean a 'considerable role for regulation'. Price cap (RPI-X) regulation gives better efficiency incentives to companies than traditional US regulation and passes benefits on to consumers. UK style privatisation and regulation put competition at the forefront whereas '...traditional US regulation for the most part suppressed it.' In electricity, competition in generation has stimulated efficiency improvements but it is still not fully effective. Big generators still set wholesale prices most of the time and the government's 'stricter consents' policy for gas-fired plant hinders entry to generation: that policy is the 'most significant obstacle to a more competitive market'. Competition to supply industrial consumers has resulted in large numbers of companies switching to new suppliers and prices have fallen considerably. Introducing competition to supply domestic consumers was a major logistical exercise. The cost was more than justified by the lower prices and other benefits now flowing from competition. Some of the changes to utility regulation now proposed by the government will not be helpful - such as the qualification to the regulators' duty to promote competition. The next step should be a further transfer, from government to consumers, of control over the utilities. A challenge is to find ways by which competition can substitute for regulation in remaining monopoly sectors.

Regulation, Productivity and Growth

Regulation, Productivity and Growth
Author: Giuseppe Nicoletti
Publisher: World Bank Publications
Total Pages: 68
Release: 2003
Genre: Antitrust law
ISBN:

In this paper, we relate the scope and depth of regulatory reforms to growth outcomes in OECD countries. By means of a new set of quantitative indicators of regulation, we show that the cross-country variation of regulatory settings has increased in recent years, despite extensive liberalisation and privatisation in the OECD area. We then look at the regulation-growth linkage using data that cover a large set of manufacturing and service industries over the past two decades. We focus on multifactor productivity (MFP), which plays a crucial role in GDP growth and accounts for a significant share of its cross-country variance. We find evidence that reforms promoting private governance and competition (where these are viable) tend to boost productivity. Both privatisation and entry liberalisation are estimated to have a positive impact on productivity. In manufacturing the gains are greater the further a given country is from the technology leader, suggesting that regulation limiting ...