Working Paper
Millennium Development Goal 7
Access to water and sanitation (target 10) is an important ingredient of quality of life. As per WHO-UNICEF assessments, globally, 77 per cent of population had access to water in 1990. This proportion has increased to 83 per cent in 2002, thus, on...
Working Paper
The Efficiency of States and Cities
In this study an attempt has been made to assess the potential of land as a municipal financing tool in four Indian cities, to enable better public service delivery and attainment of the MDGs. The institutional arrangements for land use are...
Journal Article
The Efficiency of India's Cities
One reason for unsatisfactory public service delivery in Indian cities is that city finances are in poor condition. Recent research shows that given the fragmented institutional arrangements for land in India's cities, there is a case for...
Working Paper
Absolute poverty lines
Private consumption capabilities form only one facet of comprehensive living standards assessments, but they are an important facet whose measurement should be done well. Measurement is complex due to a multitude of methodological choices, which...
Blog
From the Editor's desk (November 2011)
Tony Addison As we come to the end of November, the snow has yet to arrive in Helsinki. We continue to enjoy clear skies and spectacular sunsets...
Journal Article
Quality adjusted measures of services in public schools
This study considers specification and estimation of cost functions in public schools. A number of production characteristics are included in the specification to control for observable differences between municipalities in the provision of their...
Working Paper
Universal Access to Drinking Water
Financing and the role of aid within the water sector are poorly understood. We estimate the levels of spending achieved in developing countries during the Millennium Development Goals period to be US$80 billion per year. Aid represented a...
Working Paper
Improving Donor Support for Urban Poverty Reduction
The growing urbanization of poverty poses a significant challenge to governments and donors alike, particularly in Asia, which houses 60 per cent of the world’s slum dwellers. Donors have been slow to respond to the urban challenge, however, both in...
Working Paper
UK Utility Reforms
The UK was one of the earliest countries to undertake utility reform, which included changes in ownership, in the regulatory regime and in market structure and competition. While most agree that the programme has had beneficial effects on efficiency...
Working Paper
Can the Gains from Argentina's Utilities Reform Offset Credit Shocks?
Relying on a general equilibrium model of Argentina’s economy calibrated for 1993 and internalizing all productivity and scale gains achieved up to 1999, this paper isolates the distributional effects of utilities reform from the impact of other...
Working Paper
Capitalization, Regulation and the Poor
This paper analyses the privatization of utilities in Bolivia, detailing the particularities of the capitalization mechanism which was used for this purpose. The analysis suggests that capitalization and regulation, and the liberalization of the...
Working Paper
The Reform of the Utilities Sector in Argentina
The privatization of the national public utilities that took place almost a decade ago in Argentina seem to be explained by the persisting deficits of the enterprises, a general dissatisfaction with their performance and the difficulties government...
Working Paper
Access by the Poor in Latin America's Utility Reform
Any infrastructure reformers concerned with social issues in a developing country need to address two problems. The first is increasing access by the poor, and the second is ensuring consumption affordability, i.e. the ability of the poor to pay for...