The electricity sector in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) is in the grip of an apparent paradox. Although the region is home to the world's largest oil and gas reserves and has been able to maintain...
The annual electricity investments needed in the Middle East and North Africa region to keep up with demand have been estimated at about 3 percent of the region's projected gross domestic product. However...
The electricity sector in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) is in the grip of an apparent paradox. Although the region continues to hold the world’s largest oil and gas reserves and has been able...
The main purpose of this paper is to argue that the optimal design of regulation of water and sanitation monopolies should be the outcome of a detailed diagnostic of the institutional constraints impacting...
This paper shows that the creation of an independent regulatory agency is often not a necessary or sufficient condition to help attract private participation in the operation and financing of the water...
The state of national labor markets has always been a concern for governments and development agencies such as the World Bank. Key labor market indicators, such as the rate of unemployment, send signals...
In the next 10 years or so, the infrastructure sector has the potential to generate significant employment. This paper estimates annual job creation of about 2.0 million in direct jobs and 2.5 million...
Policy recommendations for infrastructure provision usually build on a well-established understanding of best practice for sector governance. Too rarely are they adapted to the country-specific political...
The authors constructed a standard computable general equilibrium (CGE) model to explore the economic impact of increased spending on infrastructure in six African countries: Benin, Cameroon, Mali, Senegal...
This paper provides an overview of the major current debates on infrastructure policy. It reviews the evidence on the macroeconomic significance of the sector in terms of growth and poverty alleviation...
Infrastructure has particular challenges in public procurement, because it is highly complex and customized and often requires economic, political and social considerations from a long time horizon. To...
Limited competition has been a serious concern in infrastructure procurement. Importantly, however, there are normally a number of potential bidders initially showing interest in proposed projects. This...
Competition in public procurement auctions in the water supply and sanitation sector is largely limited. This is partly because of high technical complexity and partly because of auction design flaws...
Infrastructure projects are often technically complicated and highly customized. Therefore, procurement competition tends to be limited. Competition is the single most important factor toward auction efficiency...
This report summarize on the burden of environmental policies within countries. Climate change policies will have distributional consequences across and within countries. Most of the current environmental...
To utilize public resources efficiently, it is required to take full advantage of competition in public procurement auctions. Joint bidding practices are one of the possible ways of facilitating auction...
Multidimensional auctions are a natural and practical solution when auctioneers pursue more than one objective in their public-private-partnership transactions. However, it is difficult to achieve auction...
Asymmetric auctions are among the most rapidly growing areas in the auction literature. The potential benefits from improved auction efficiency are expected to be enormous in public procurement auctions...
Infrastructure is the engine for economic growth. The international donor community has spent about 70-100 billion U.S. dollars on infrastructure development in developing countries every year. However...
The authors explore the relation between the establishment of a regulatory agency and the performance of the electricity sector. The authors exploit a unique dataset comprising firm-level information on...