International Coercion, Emulation and Policy Diffusion: Market-Oriented Infrastructure Reforms, 1977-1999

Why do some countries adopt market-oriented reforms such as deregulation, privatization and liberalization of competition in their infrastructure industries while others do not? Why did the pace of adoption accelerate in the 1990s? Building on neo-institutional theory in sociology, we argue that the domestic adoption of market-oriented reforms is strongly influenced by international pressures of coercion and emulation. We find robust support for these arguments with an event-history analysis of the determinants of reform in the telecommunications and electricity sectors of as many as 205 countries and territories between 1977 and 1999. Our results also suggest that the coercive effect of multilateral lending from the IMF, the World Bank or Regional Development Banks is increasing over time, a finding that is consistent with anecdotal evidence that multilateral organizations have broadened the scope of the “conditionality” terms specifying market-oriented reforms imposed on borrowing countries. We discuss the possibility that, by pressuring countries into policy reform, cross-national coercion and emulation may not produce ideal outcomes.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/40099/3/wp713.pd

Initial experience from the first CoordiNet demonstration

The CoordiNet project within Horizon 2020 programme aims to demonstrate how distribution system operators and transmission system operators can act in a coordinated manner to procure and activate grid services in the most cost-effective and reliable way. This is done through the implementation of three large-scale demonstrations in Sweden, Greece and Spain. The first market to be set into operation was within the Swedish demo in the winter of 2019/2020. The outcome of the flexibility market during the first winter with congestion management day-ahead is described in this study. The results from implementation of the platform, user interface, learnings on stakeholder interaction and initial evaluation of key performance indicators are described