Argentina S Transport Privatization And Re Regulation

"Argentina's policy for reform of the transport sector has been a mix of competition in the market and, through concessions, for the market. Capacity has increased, demand has grown, and prices and services have improved. Public financing has not been eliminated but it has been drastically reduced"--Cover.

The 1990s saw an increase in the liberalisation of transport policies and a strengthening of the role of private operators and investors in transport infrastructure worldwide. The search for sustained improvement in efficiency is probably secondary to the need to find additional financing, but it is improvement in services that is at the core of the new role of the government in transport. Governments must now become fair economic regulators of many of the privately operated transport services and infrastructures. This book examines the major challenges that governments are likely to face in taking on their new role in transport.

Electricity, natural gas, telecommunications, railways, and water supply, are often vertically and horizontally integrated state monopolies. This results in weak services, especially in developing and transition economies, and for poor people. Common problems include low productivity, high costs, bad quality, insufficient revenue, and investment shortfalls. Many countries over the past two decades have restructured, privatized and regulated their infrastructure. This report identifies the challenges involved in this massive policy redirection. It also assesses the outcomes of these changes, as well as their distributional consequences for poor households and other disadvantaged groups. It recommends directions for future reforms and research to improve infrastructure performance, identifying pricing policies that strike a balance between economic efficiency and social equity, suggesting rules governing access to bottleneck infrastructure facilities, and proposing ways to increase poor people's access to these crucial services.

'...developing countries, complementing their far-reaching privatization programs, are engaged in deregulating various sectors of their economies and devising new regulatory frameworks for others, particularly the utilities sectors.' As economies become more open, pressures on countries to become more competitive drive the call for regulatory reform to reduce costs and foster increased productivity, competitiveness, and growth. This report provides an overview of the costs and benefits of regulation throughout the world. It provides case histories of regulation in different countries, developed and developing and in various sectors, such as, transportation, utilities, and power. It presents different strategies that were employed. Furthermore, it identifies lessons learned and lays the foundations for a best practice scenario for other countries to adopt. While the challenges to regulatory reform are considerable, so are the efforts that developing countries are making to face them. These lessons, when properly adapted to each country's own environment, can significantly increase the likelihood of effective regulation.

Transport costs have been, and still are, an important component of trade costs, which are one the major determinants of the volume of trade, and thus of gross domestic product (GDP) and GDP growth. Studies show that two of the main determinants of transport costs are regulatory frameworks in transport sectors and transport infrastructure. The productivity and competitiveness of goods and services firms depends largely on access to low-cost and high-quality transport services, and those services have a powerful influence on economic growth. Countries commit themselves to increasing the efficiency of transport services, which can largely be achieved through increased competition and hence through liberalization of transport sectors. Since barriers to trade in transport services are typically regulatory in nature, this book provides a thorough discussion of international, regional, and country specific rules and regulations in those sectors. Concentrating on the EU, and Turkey in particular, it considers rules and regulations in transport sectors. It shows that economic liberalization pursued unilaterally, multilaterally, or regionally has beneficial effects for Turkey, and that the benefits from such liberalization are substantial. Furthermore, the volume shows that transport infrastructure is an important determinant of exports, and hence GDP and GDP growth.

Since the late 1970s China has made extensive policy reforms and infrastructure investments. Although there have been significant investments made over the past decades, most of these investments came from the public sector. The goal of this report is to help improve China's approach to private participation in infrastructure focusing on roads, water and sanitation, and power generation by expanding foreign direct investment and domestic financing in such projects. It compares China's experience with those of other countries.