Regulatory Issues in the Water Sector. Which Institutions Matter Most?

摘要

IF we look at the deregulation movement of the last 25 years or so, the pace of reform in the water sector has been remarkably slow, and changes likely the less radical among public utilities. Water was never deregulated. Even in the most spectacular reforms, like the one implemented in the U.K. at the end of the 1980s, the sector remained heavily regulated. Moreover, there was never a significant move towards privatization. At most there has been private participation, supervised by a very visible public hand. A recent survey of 973 major urban water and sanitation systems in developing countries showed only 136 of them involving private sector participation, with divestitures constituting 10 percent of this subset, while 66 percent were concessions, 19 percent management contracts, and the remaining 5 percent leases or 'affermages' [3, p. 16].