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Publications (24)
– A Fair Deal for Consumers?
Latin American countries have now privatized a large number of their utility industries and make more use of market approaches to delivery through networks. Privatization has major consequences for efficiency, long-term growth, consumer welfare and income distribution but insufficient attention has...
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In spite of not being ‘public goods’ in the strict sense of the term, public provision has been a common way of supplying utilities services around the world. Among the major reasons underlying the dominant position of the public sector as the provider of infrastructure are the recognition of the...
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– The British IT Consulting Industry as a Contemporary Specimen
The Internet is often anticipated to have disruptive competitive impacts, causing upstart firms to overthrow incumbent market leaders. This paper uses the UK IT consulting industry as a test case to see whether such competitive impacts of the Internet might already be occurring. Comparable possible...
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– Technology, Policy, People, and Strategies
This study explores the on-going development of a global digital economy through a case-study analysis of its impact on and prospects in South Africa. It argues that four factors are key to understanding the impact of the digital economy on a developing country: (i) the level of technology...
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The rapid development and diffusion of the information and communications technology (ICT) is the major driving force of the New Economy. While there is ample evidence to suggest that the ICT industry has contributed a great deal to the overall economic growth of the developed countries, its role in...
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– Subsidies and Service Obligations
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 both consumption and the amortization of the...
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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 faced in their control. During the period of...
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The core industries of the new information economy are characterized by imperfect competition, asymmetric information or external effects. Thus, well-designed microeconomic policies, in the form of competition policies, technology policies or combinations of these, have strong potential of...
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– Access to Basic Services in Bolivia
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 utilities sector more generally, succeeded in...
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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 reforms taking place in the country during the 1990s...
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This paper assesses the contribution of software to India's economic development, paying particular attention to the role of software in the absorption of labour and the development of human capital in the economy. India's specialization in software has been driven by two sorts of wage advantages...
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Privatization has been one of the primary factors generating changes in the Chilean economy over the last decade. Privatization has faced some opposition due part to its uncertain effect on employment and prices. Despite the importance of the topic, only few attempts have been made to analyse...
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Almost five years after privatization took place in electricity and telecommunications, and major reforms had been carried out in the administration of water, the results is not clear a priori. In order to elucidate the panorama, this research tries to assess the consumption and welfare impacts of...
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– A Global Perspective
This paper presents a global perspective on infrastructure coverage and the poor that many people will think they have seen before but in fact have not. It is widely assumed that the poor in developing countries have fewer infrastructure services than middle and upper- income households, but there...
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This paper analyses the reforms that have taken place in the utilities sectors in Spain, with a focus on the political role in shaping the process of these reforms. We argue that the deregulation process was marked by the historical close collaboration between the government and the industry, which...
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This paper investigates the factors which determine the diffusion of the Internet across countries. The Gompertz model of technology diffusion is estimated using data on Internet hosts per capita for the years 1995-2000. For a sample of the 0ECD countries, the basic finding is that GDP per capita...
Displaying 16 of 24 results