'More Bang for the Buck'

摘要

In the old days, if you were a poor country in need of a new power plant, there was only one way to get it: ask a ' superpower. It helped to be a strategic pawn on the cold-war chessboard. Certainly nobody cared very much what price you planned to charge for the electricity. These days, if you need a power plant, you're better off calling Enron Development Corp. It has built facilities across the Third World, from Colombia to the Philippines; last fall it signed preliminary agreements for a $500 million natural-gas project with the government of Mozambique, one of the world's biggest basket cases. "You can find private investment capital ready to flow into any country in the world, from the strongest to the poorest," says Enron vice president Linda Powers. "They just have to have a receptive environment."