The sustainability of electricity sector liberalization in Latin America

摘要

Within the developing world, Latin America has been at the forefront of implementing far-reaching reforms in the electricity sector. Starting with the gradual privatization of utilities in Chile under Augusto Pinochet in the 1980s, the major wave of restructuring, unbundling and the creation of competitive wholesale markets spread in the first half of the 1990s from Chile to its neighbouring countries Argentina, Bolivia and Peru, and then later to Colombia, Brazil and several Central American and Caribbean states. Even if some governments did not implement a policy of full liberalization, the privatization of individual generation and distribution utilities or the integration of independent power producers (IPPs) under a single buyer model led to a change in the ownership composition and control rights in many countries in the region, such as Mexico and Trinidad and Tobago.