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.

A background paper for a course on transport privatization and regulation, organized by the World Bank Institute.For a World Bank Institute course on transport privatization, Betancor and Rendeiro (of the University of Las Palmas, Spain) cover basic issues associated with the regulation of privatized airport infrastructure and services:- Economic characteristics of airports. Three types of activities are carried out in airports: essential operational services (aeronautical and non-aeronautical), handling services (aeronautical and non-aeronautical), and commercial activities.Demand for basic airport services is directly influenced by trip purpose. The two types of airline customers (business and leisure travelers) need different levels of flexibility and tend to travel at different times. Analyzing airport capacity (practical and saturation) under peak demand is essential to airport success.Among other important issues: Runway costs, level and volume of service, pollution, congestion, and air traffic control.- Recent trends in the airport industry. The movement toward privatization may involve public ownership and private operation, including joint ventures; partial or majority divestiture; management contracts; and BOT (build-operate-transfer) schemes and variants, including BOOT (build-own-operate-transfer) schemes and LDO (lease-develop-operate) schemes.Or it may involve private ownership and operation.- Price regulation. Topics covered include traditional pricing policies; price regulation through an RPI-X formula; charges for congestion, noise, and other externalities; investment plans; and design of the regulatory system.- Regulation of quality in the industry. Topics covered: regulation of services to passengers (as measured by targets for check-in queues, immigration queues, baggage reclaim queues, concourse crowding, shopping, parking, and so on); fault repair times; average levels of passenger boarding and disembarkation and baggage delivery; safety; and investment obligations.- Performance indicators in the industry. Topics covered: strategic indicators and other financial indicators (including revenues), as well as indicators of cost, productivity, and quality of service.This paper - a product of Governance, Regulation, and Finance, World Bank Institute - was prepared as a background paper for the course on transport privatization organized by the institute. Ofelia Betancor may be contacted at [email protected].

The 1990s saw an increase in the liberalisation of transport policies and a strengthening of the role of private operators and investors in transport infrastructure worldwide. The search for sustained improvement in efficiency is probably secondary to the need to find additional financing, but it is improvement in services that is at the core of the new role of the government in transport. Governments must now become fair economic regulators of many of the privately operated transport services and infrastructures. This book examines the major challenges that governments are likely to face in taking on their new role in transport.

Michael Likosky examines the continuities and discontinuities between colonial and present-day high tech transnational legal orders. His concern is specifically with the colonial characteristics of the legal order which underpins the global high tech economy. He distinguishes the democratic and human rights rhetoric of this economy from a reality wherein the legal order is often used to reproduce colonial-type relationships. Just as in the colonial period, the expansion of trans-border commerce overlaps with democratic demands and human rights in complex, multifaceted and paradoxical ways. Through a case study looking at Malaysia's Multimedia Super Corridor, a high tech national development plan and foreign direct investment scheme, he examines how the transnational leaders of the high tech economy along with the Malaysian political elite react when human rights problems threaten to derail commercial plans.

Issues vital to private investors, from competition law to tax aspects, are surveyed here by accountants and lawyers from throughout the EU. The text shows the extent to which deregulation, or "liberalization," of industrial sectors in the member states of the European Union (EU) has impacted beyond the economies and financial markets of Europe. As more sectors of the European economy open to private participants, the effect on the aviation, rail, insurance, telecommunications, and utilities sectors, as this insightful text shows, will continue to intensify dramatically. Published under the Transnational Publishers imprint.

"Learning to regulate fairly, effectively, and at arm's length may be the main challenge governments face in attracting private investment and financing to the transport sector"--Cover.