Download or read book Infrastructure Performance and Reform in Developing and Transition Economies written by Lourdes Trujillo and published by World Bank Publications. This book was released on 2005 with total page 28 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Estache, Perelman, and Trujillo review about 80 studies on electricity and gas, water and sanitation, and rail and ports (with a footnote on telecommunications) in developing countries. The main policy lesson is that there is a difference in the relevance of ownership for efficiency between utilities and transport in developing countries. In transport, private operators have tended to perform better than public operators. For utilities, ownership often does not matter as much as sometimes argued. Most cross-country studies find no statistically significant difference in efficiency scores between public and private providers. As for the country-specific studies, some do find differences in performance over time but these differences tend to matter much less than a large number of other variables. Across sectors, private operators functioning in a competitive environment or regulated under price caps or hybrid regulatory regimes tend to catch up best practice faster than public operators. There is a very strong case to push regulators in developing and transition economies toward a more systematic reliance on yardstick competition in a sector in which residual monopoly powers tend to be common. This paper--a product of the Office of the Vice President, Infrastructure Network--is part of a larger effort in the network to document the state of the sector"--World Bank web site.
Download or read book Infrastructure Performance and Reform in Developing and Transition Economies written by Antonio Estache and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The authors review about 80 studies on electricity and gas, water and sanitation, and rail and ports (with a footnote on telecommunications) in developing countries. The main policy lesson is that there is a difference in the relevance of ownership for efficiency between utilities and transport in developing countries. In transport, private operators have tended to perform better than public operators. For utilities, ownership often does not matter as much as sometimes argued. Most cross-country studies find no statistically significant difference in efficiency scores between public and private providers. As for the country-specific studies, some do find differences in performance over time but these differences tend to matter much less than a large number of other variables. Across sectors, private operators functioning in a competitive environment or regulated under price caps or hybrid regulatory regimes tend to catch up best practice faster than public operators. There is a very strong case to push regulators in developing and transition economies toward a more systematic reliance on yardstick competition in a sector in which residual monopoly powers tend to be common.
Download or read book Reforming Infrastructure written by Ioannis Nicolaos Kessides and published by World Bank Publications. This book was released on with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Reforming Infrastructure written by Ioannis Nicolaos Kessides and published by World Bank Publications. This book was released on 2004 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Services Policy Reform and Economic Growth in Tranisition Economics written by and published by World Bank Publications. This book was released on with total page 20 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Economic reform in developing countries written by Lyn Squire and published by Edward Elgar Publishing. This book was released on 2008-05-30 with total page 413 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers insights into the process of economic reform in developing countries. It is organized around three factors that are critical to the success of any reform. According to Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen, these key dimensions are Reach, Range, and Reason. 'Reach' refers to the ability of reform to be person-centered and evenhanded, reaching all individuals in society. 'Range' considers the institutional reforms and policy changes necessary to implement change and the possible ripple effects on other policies and populations. Finally, 'Reason' captures the importance of constantly asking why a particular reform has been selected.
Download or read book World Development Report 1994 written by and published by World Bank Publications. This book was released on 1994 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: World Development Report 1994 examines the link between infrastructure and development and explores ways in which developing countries can improve both the provision and the quality of infrastructure services. In recent decades, developing countries have made substantial investments in infrastructure, achieving dramatic gains for households and producers by expanding their access to services such as safe water, sanitation, electric power, telecommunications, and transport. Even more infrastructure investment and expansion are needed in order to extend the reach of services - especially to people living in rural areas and to the poor. But as this report shows, the quantity of investment cannot be the exclusive focus of policy. Improving the quality of infrastructure service also is vital. Both quantity and quality improvements are essential to modernize and diversify production, help countries compete internationally, and accommodate rapid urbanization. The report identifies the basic cause of poor past performance as inadequate institutional incentives for improving the provision of infrastructure. To promote more efficient and responsive service delivery, incentives need to be changed through commercial management, competition, and user involvement. Several trends are helping to improve the performance of infrastructure. First, innovation in technology and in the regulatory management of markets makes more diversity possible in the supply of services. Second, an evaluation of the role of government is leading to a shift from direct government provision of services to increasing private sector provision and recent experience in many countries with public-private partnerships is highlighting new ways to increase efficiency and expand services. Third, increased concern about social and environmental sustainability has heightened public interest in infrastructure design and performance.
Download or read book Accounting for Poverty in Infrastructure Reform written by Antonio Estache and published by World Bank Publications. This book was released on 2002 with total page 136 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Annotation This book provides practical guidelines and options for infrastructure reform that result in access and affordability for the poor. It includes a new model for reform that consists of three main components - policies, regulation, and provision which when properly balanced minimize the risks associated with reform.
Download or read book Modernizing Infrastructure in Transformation Economies written by Christian von Hirschhausen and published by Edward Elgar Publishing. This book was released on 2002 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ''This book should be thought-provoking reading for academics and practitioners with a professional interest in infrastructure services, policy design, and the agenda for infrastructure reform in transition economies. Christian von Hirschhausen''s rigorous, multi-sector analysis provides a first-time attempt at a balanced assessment of conceptual and practical issues regarding a critical area of the transition to markets. The book also questions some of the generally accepted findings regarding what works and what doesn''t in the restructuring of infrastructure in the former centrally-planned economies, with special attention to the political economy of reform.'' - José Carbajo, European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), London, UK ''The theoretical basis is impressive and the empirical evidence authentic: the book breathes the dust of Hungarian highways and the rust of Estonian power plants. In over five years of field research, the author has acquired an unmatched understanding of the topic and provides clear-cut, highly relevant policy conclusions for EU-enlargement.'' - Axel Siedenberg, Deutsche Bank Research / Economics, Germany ''This book is an insightful study of the neglected issue of the infrastructure of transition economies in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. It chronicles the socialist infrastructure''s incompatibility with a market economy and its collapse using aggregate data and valuable case studies, particularly of the energy and transport sectors. Although there have been clear transition successes, the search for an optimal infrastructure policy has been elusive. Although market-based solutions have delivered less than promised due to political-economy and technological factors, their results have not proven inferior to more conservative regulatory approaches. Modernizing Infrastructure in Transformation Economies rounds out our knowledge of a key aspect of the transition process and is to be recommended to all serious scholars of transition and European integration.'' - Paul Gregory, University of Houston, US ''This is the first comprehensive treatment of a highly topical issue. The message of this book is that transition economies need a substantial overhaul of their infrastructure, but that they should ponder gradual rather than radical ways for deregulation and privatization. Institutional, technical and financial constraints should not be ignored and" one-fits-all" type policies are inappropriate.'' - Irina Akimova, Institute for Economic Research, Ukraine The design of infrastructure policies is a controversial issue in the transition economies of Eastern Europe, where the dismal state of infrastructure was widely regarded to be one of the major obstacles to economic recovery and sustained growth. With the imminent enlargement of the EU, Christian von Hirschhausen provides a detailed, reflective analysis of the state of infrastructure development in Eastern Europe. The author illustrates the different approaches to modernizing infrastructure and the successes that have been achieved in terms of fiscal relief, private investment and increased efficiency. Based upon a comparative institutional analysis and extensive field research and case studies, he provides empirical evidence from different sectors (power, gas, railways, roads, R&D), with particular emphasis on countries such as Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, the Baltics and Russia. Given the substantial institutional instability of the early years of transition, the author promotes a gradual but time-consistent approach to liberalization as a more promising path towards a market economy and increased efficiency. The author offers sound policy recommendations on how best to achieve the successful modernization of East European infrastructure in the course of EU-enlargement. This book will be indispensable to all researchers and academics of European integration and transition economics, policymakers in the EU, and institutions such as development banks which are active in the restructuring process in Eastern Europe and EU-enlargement.
Download or read book Infrastructure Privatization and Regulation written by Ioannis N. Kessides and published by . This book was released on 2005 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Infrastructure Services in Developing Countries written by Cecilia Brice??o-Garmendia and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The authors review the evidence on the state of infrastructure in the developing world, emphasizing the investment needs and the emerging policy issues. While their assessment is seriously constrained by data gaps, they provide useful insights on the main challenges ahead, emphasizing that, in addition to the widely discussed access problems, the poorest also face major affordability and service quality issues which were not well addressed by the reforms of the 1990s. The authors make a case for a stronger commitment of the international community to generate the information needed to assess and monitor infrastructure needs and policies.
Download or read book The Determinants of Performance in Building Infrastructure in Transition Economies written by and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 25 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This paper investigates how contract specificities affect the performance of municipal infrastructure projects in the transportation, district heating, water, waste water and solid waste sectors. Using data from projects financed by the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, we look at the effect of involving private parties with varying degrees of risk, and involving public parties other than the respective municipality.
Download or read book Liberalization and Regulation of the Telecommunications Sector in Transition Countries written by Ekaterina Markova and published by Physica. This book was released on 2009-08-29 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Telecommunications are increasingly recognized as a key component in the infrastructure of economic development. For many years, there were state-owned monopolies in the telecommunications sector. In transition economies, they were characterized by especially poor performance and high access deficits, as telecommunications were considered to be a non-profit-oriented production process intended to support the socio-economic superstructures. As a result, the starting point for the reform processes in transition countries was quite poor performed public monopolies, functioned under completely different circumstances as the peers in the market economies. The main question of this book is what the strategies for the successful future development of the telecommunications sector in transition countries are. The special focus is on Russia, the largest of the transition countries.
Download or read book Are We There Yet written by Stephen Carl Grothouse and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 61 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the growing body of literature dedicated to assessing the link between attempts at targeted infrastructure reform in developing countries and resulting infrastructure performance. Though previous studies have examined this topic, most have limited their focus to the direct relationship between the mere existence of reform efforts and improvements in infrastructure performance. However, very recently some research has recognized that, though infrastructure reforms are necessary, their effectiveness is likely conditional on the quality of implementation and continued support for those reforms. Studies to date that have accounted for such factors have typically confined their focus to specific regions of the world and only to empirical analysis of infrastructure sector governance. By contrast, this study utilizes panel data, from 84 countries over the period 1996-2008, to investigate whether, which, and to what degree factors affect infrastructure performance at the country level. Specifically, it finds that countries with a high degree of financial liberalization, quality governing institutions, and surprisingly highly polarized political systems enjoy healthier infrastructure vitality. Furthermore, it lays the groundwork for testing the degree to which the effectiveness of targeted infrastructure reform is conditional on a modicum of sufficiency in certain country level influences.
Download or read book The World Bank Research Observer written by and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Economics of Infrastructure written by L. N. Dash and published by . This book was released on 2007-01-01 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contents Include : Spatial Disparities In Infrastructure And Its Impact On Economic Growth : Evidence From India; Infrastructure Needs In India : An Input-Output Analysis; Infrastructural Development And Regional Disparity A District-Level Analysis; Indian Power Sector An Overview; Power Infrastructure In India : Performance Is Yet To Reach Desirable Level; The Economics Of Infrastructure And Power Sector Reforms; Impact Of Infrastructure On Economic Development : A Study Of Indian Transport Sector; Some Issues In Indian Mobile Telecommunication; Health, Education And Human Development; Financing Of Education In India; Healthcare Provision In India; Financing Of Health Infrastructure In India.
Download or read book Bureaucrats in Business written by and published by World Bank Publications. This book was released on 1995 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Refer review of this policy book in 'Journal of International Development, vol. 10, 7, 1998. pp.841-855.
