Description Timothy Irwin and Ian Alexander. (1996). Privatizing Infrastructure—Capital Market Pressures and Management Incentives. This Note examines how owners and lenders encourage managers to run private firms well and proposes some privatization rules for infrastructure companies. While it draws mostly on the experience of the United Kingdom and the United States, two countries in which privately owned infrastructure has an established track record, the lessons are just as relevant to developing countries.

Description Governor's Office Of Regulatory Reform. (1998). Cost benefit Handbook: a Guide for New York State’s Regulatory Agencies. This manual is intended to give regulators a feel for the range of issues they contemplate and assess as part of a comprehensive cost-benefit analysis. It guidance document" (as some agencies use that phrase) or a prescription of exactly every cost-benefit analysis must be performed. We expect agencies to use their judgment and common sense. This handbook should help agencies exercise this judgment in an informed way.

Description Alexis Hardin, Henry Ergas and John Small. (1999). Economic Depreciation In Telecommunications Cost Models. This paper identifies the difference between accounting and economic depreciation shows that the regulatory and competitive state of Australia’s telecommunications makes the latter the appropriate for use in forward-looking cost models.

Description Philippe Benoit. (1997). The World Bank Group’s Financial Instruments for Infrastructure. This Note provides an overview of the main financial instruments offered by the Group’s financial organizations for Reconstruction and the International (IDA), together referred the International Finance and the Multilateral Agency (MIGA). It describes the basic financial and contractual structures of these instruments and illustrates their role through a hypothetical project to construct a power plant in a host country.

Description Ian Alexander and Timothy Irwin. (1996). Price Caps, Rate-of-Return Regulation, and the Cost of Capital. This Note compares the effects of price cap and rate-of-return regulation on the risks borne by regulated utilities. It presents evidence that price cap regulation subjects firms to greater risks and therefore raises their cost of capital. This result has one clear implication: firms regulated by price caps must be permitted to earn higher returns. If they are not, they will be unable to attract new investment capital and the quality of their service will decline.

Description Peter L. Smith and Björn Wellenius. (1999). Mitigating Regulatory Risk in Telecommunications. In the transition from state-owned monopolies to privately led and increasingly competitive market structures in telecommunications, poor performance of regulatory agencies limits the benefits of reform, especially in countries with a tradition of weak governance. Bearing in mind that the main objective is not a successful agency but a well-performing sector, this Note proposes measures for establishing a regulatory framework that enables better sector performance even when an effective, full-fledged regulatory agency is lacking. These measures reduce the need for agency decisions, enhance the credibility of regulation, and generate maximum impact from scarce professional and financial resources by using them effectively. Although each of the measures has a primary purpose, several contribute to more than one.