The Impact of Private Sector Participation in Infrastructure : Lights, Shadows, and the Road Ahead
As numerous countries in Latin America and the Caribbean and elsewhere are moving toward a second phase of private participation in infrastructure programs mostly through public-private partnership schemes and other countries are just beginning the...
| Main Authors: | , , , |
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| Format: | Publication |
| Language: | English en_US |
| Published: |
Washington, DC : World Bank
2012
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/2008/07/9880227/impact-private-sector-participation-infrastructure-lights-shadows-road-ahead http://hdl.handle.net/10986/6545 |
| Summary: | As numerous countries in Latin America
and the Caribbean and elsewhere are moving toward a second
phase of private participation in infrastructure programs
mostly through public-private partnership schemes and other
countries are just beginning the process, several concerns
remain from the outcomes of the first phase. These concerns
are making governments cautious in moving forward. The
Impact of private sector participation in infrastructure
addresses these concerns and brings clarity to the debate on
the impact of private participation in infrastructure. The
assessment of this impact may be one of the most emotional
policy issues in economics, as it is clouded in a mist of
myths, perceptions, and reality. This book analyzes the
impact and sorts out the truth from the myths. The authors
take a systematic and hard look at the facts (i.e., data) in
Latin America, where starting in the late 1980s, many
governments brought private sector participation into the
delivery of essential utilities services. Although there are
many assessments of this experience, none was able to rely
on systemic, cross-country, and time-series data, and
practically all of them did not save rare exceptions account
for what would have happened in the absence of interventions
(the counterfactual). This book does just that. It brings
together an all encompassing database from the 1980s to the
first decade of this century and develops an effective and
robust methodology, accounting for the counterfactual, which
tests and estimates the impact of reform on an exceptionally
wide set of outcome indicators. As a result, this book
presents the most in-depth study to date of the private
sector participation experience in Latin America, and it
substantially advances the existing literature by offering
robust econometric analysis. |
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