Infrastructure regulation and poverty reduction in developing countries: a review of the evidence and a research agenda

Poverty reduction is a primary goal of development policy. In large parts of the World people have to live on meagre incomes and have limited access to infrastructure services, such as mains water, safe sanitation, mains power supplies, maintained roads and telephones. In response, more and more infrastructure provision has been opened up to private investment over the last two decades and regulatory institutions have been introduced to protect the public interest in the absence of state ownership. In this paper the role of infrastructure regulation in poverty reduction is investigated drawing on the published evidence. The conclusion is that the evidence is both patchy and sometimes contradictory. There is mixed knowledge regarding the extent to which regulators address poverty issues and about the results of regulatory decisions. The paper concludes by proposing a future research agenda aimed at improving our understanding of the ways in which infrastructure regulation impacts on poverty, with the objective of improving actual regulatory policy in developing economies

Creating the Conditions for International Business Expansion: The Impact of Regulation on Economic Growth in Developing Countries - A Cross-Country Analysis

The role of an effective regulatory regime in promoting economic growth and development and therefore international business has generated considerable interest among researchers and practitioners in recent years. In particular, building effective regulatory structures in developing countries is not simply an issue of the technical design of the most appropriate regulatory instruments, it is also concerned with the quality of supporting regulatory institutions and capacity. Many of the institutions that support markets are publicly provided and the effectiveness of these regulatory institutions can be expected to be an important determinant of how well markets function. This paper explores the role of regulation in affecting economic outcomes using an econometric model of the impact of regulatory governance. More precisely, it assesses through econometric modelling the impact of variations in the quality of regulatory governance on economic growth. Proxies for regulatory quality are included as determinants of economic growth. The results based on two different techniques of estimation suggest a strong causal link between regulatory quality and economic performance. The results confirm that "good" regulation is associated with higher economic growth, which in turn is conducive to the expansion of international business.economic growth, regulation, governance, institutions, economic performance, International Development, C23, I18, L33, L51, L98, O38, O50,

Assessing the Effects of Privatisation, Competition and Regulation on Economic Performance: The Case of Electricity Sector Reform

Over the last two decades electricity sectors in both developed and developing countries have been subject to restructuring to introduce private capital and increase competition. This has been accompanied by the introduction of new regulatory regimes. Although the effects of such reforms in a number of the developed economies are now well documented, apart from a few case studies the experience of developing countries is much less well researched. This is important because privatisation, competition and the reform of state regulation are key themes of donor aid programmes, notably those of the World Bank. This paper provides an econometric assessment of the effects of privatisation, competition and regulation on the performance of the electricity generation industry using panel data for 36 developing and transitional countries, over the period 1985 to 2003. The study identifies the impact of these reforms on generating capacity, electricity generated, labour productivity in the generating sector and capacity utilisation. The main conclusions are that on their own privatisation and regulation do not lead to obvious gains in economic performance, though there are some positive interaction effects. By contrast, introducing competition does seem to be effective in stimulating performance improvements.Privatisation, competition, regulation, developing economies, electricity sector.