1,721,011 research outputs found
Limits to competition and regulation in privatized electricity markets
Get PDFPrivatization of electricity has been extensive both in the developed and the developing world. Failures in various areas have led to the emergence of a new consensus which regards competitive pressures and regulation as crucial for utility privatizations to work. This review paper presents a critical evaluation of this newly found wisdom with reference to the developing economies. The experience in the developed world, especially in the USA and the UK, has been used to draw conclusions for the developing economies. Overall, the paper highlights the problems associated with the 'competitive model' both in the developed and developing world and points to the potential instability in private competitive power supply systems. It also examines the degree to which regulation can be a panacea for market failures and structural problems under private provision
Waiting for Miracles : The Commercialization of Urban Water Services in Zambia
Get PDFThis article focuses on the commercialization of urban water services in Zambia. It aims to demonstrate the tension between cost recovery and service extension when water sector reforms combine investment cuts with price increases. It is argued that in low-income economies where infrastructure limitations are serious and poverty is widespread, heavy reliance on ‘tariff rationalization’ with low levels of investment can lead to reduced access to water and render water charges unaffordable. Reforms to public services can prove futile in the absence of upfront resources for investment in the restoration and extension of the existing infrastructure. In many ways, Zambia typifies other low-income economies; this study thus offers useful lessons for the
Privatisation for Poverty Reduction : The case of Bangladesh
Get PDFThe shift in the last two decades from a state-led to a market oriented development strategy in most of the developing countries under the directions of the World Bank and the IMF has had its repercussions on policy making for poverty reduction. The role of the state has been redefined both in terms of its stance in the market and the ways in which it intervened in the process of redistribution. In the meantime, the concern over the persistence and/or rise of poverty in many LDCs and transition economies in the 1980s and 1990s led various parties to reconsider the relationship between economic policies and social objectives. The two major actors of policy making in developing world, i.e. the World Bank and the IMF, revised the nature of their policy conditional lending. The primary focus on stabilization and structural adjustment (SSA) shifted in a seemingly significant way to a strategy of poverty reduction. SSA packages have been replaced by the Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs) after the late 1990s. Although the latter were designed by the governments in each country, they, in many ways, encompassed the standard SSA policies. Invariably, poverty reduction strategy papers of individual economies included privatisation of state owned enterprises (SOEs) as an essential component of the poverty reduction process. SOEs have been viewed to be draining the resources of the nations (because of overstaffing, excessive budgetary support, loss making and inefficiency) which can be more productively used for crucial social purposes e.g. poverty reduction. In this paper, we aim to revisit the process of privatisation with a view to explore its implications for poverty reduction in the context of a low-income country, namely Bangladesh. The first part presents an overview of the issues with respect to privatization in general terms. The subsequent sections evaluate the process of privatization in Bangladesh in view of its impact on employment, revenue generation and efficiency
Privatizar para reduzir a pobreza? : O caso de Bangladesh e sua relevância para outras economias em desenvolvimento Privatization to reduce povertythe case of Bangladesh and its relevance for other developing economies
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Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
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