Reforming Russian Infrastructure For Competition And Efficiency

This book compiles the proceedings of four meetings held at the request of the Minister for Antimonopoly Policy of the Russian Federation, on the reform of railroads, telecommunications, electricity and natural gas, during December 2000-September 2001.

OECD's review of investment policy in Slovenia for 2002.

This review of regulatory reform in Russia covers the overall economic context, the government’s capacity to manage regulatory reform, competition policy and enforcement, and market openness. It also examines the electricity and railroad sectors.

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.

In 1991, a small group of Russians emerged from the collapse of the Soviet Union and enjoyed one of the greatest transfers of wealth ever seen, claiming ownership of some of the most valuable petroleum, natural gas and metal deposits in the world. By 1997, five of those individuals were on Forbes Magazine's list of the world's richest billionaires.

This series of publications presents studies on regulatory reform in the Asia-Pacific area resulting from the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation (APEC)-OECD Co-operative Initiative on Regulatory Reform. Most of the documents are conference proceedings, with each proceeding including a summary of the discussions and the papers presented. Some of the papers presented are country-specific and others are issue-specific.Less.