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This paper analyzes the quantitative impact of the growing role of non-traditional financial actors, in particular institutional investors, in the financing structure and consumer pricing of regulated private utilities. The focus is on the water sector in England and Wales, where the effect of the firms' corporate financing strategies on key outcome variables may have been underestimated. The analysis is based on a staggered difference-in-differences estimation of the impacts of the evolution of the ownership of the assets, namely an increased participation of institutional investors, on leveraging and water pricing decisions. It shows a statistically significant positive impact on leverage levels and average consumer prices. ; info:eu-repo/semantics/published

The paper suggests a method to distinguish between various possible motivations (e.g. political vs economic) underlying policy implementation such as public investments. The true motivation can be revealed by modelling each policy goal, as the focus of the optimization anchoring a data envelopment analysis of the efficiency of the observed implementation. The approach is tested on Spain's land transport infrastructure policy since it is argued by many observers to be driven more by political than economic concerns. The method clearly shows that investments have generally been more consistent with a political objective (the centralization of economic power) than with an economic objective (maximizing mobility). ; info:eu-repo/semantics/published

This note provides an overview of: (i) the threshold used in policy discussions to assess the extent to which users of an infrastructure service have an affordability problem or not for an acceptable level of consumption of the service as defined by international organizations or sometimes national governments; (ii) the average share of resources allocated to each infrastructure subsector for a sample of 90 countries for developing and emerging economies and for 26 European countries, as a proxy for developed countries practice; and (iii) an assessment of this share for consumption quartiles for developing economies and income quintiles for the European economies. It then produces a series of tables of regional averages which could be used to conduct rough benchmarkings of national observations. Discussions of data limitations and suggestions for additional work conclude the note. ; info:eu-repo/semantics/published

The paper surveys the evidence for developing countries of the relevance for the poor of the ownership choice (i.e. public vs. private vs. mixed) in electricity and water & sanitation utilities. It shows that most of the still widely quoted evidence is outdated (based on pre-2010 data) and fails to reflect the longer term evolution of the ownership choices of the 1990s. The most recent data suggests that it matters less to social outcomes than regulatory governance and market structure. It makes the case for an ownership choice more coherent with the context and capacity constraints of countries and sectors. It also identifies significant knowledge gaps on the ways in which social considerations can be addressed under any ownership type and this defines a new research agenda. ; info:eu-repo/semantics/published