This book provides insights into infrastructure sector performance by focusing on the links between key indicators for utilities, and changes in ownership, regulatory agency governance, and corporate governance, among other dimensions. By linking inputs and outputs over the last 15 years, the analysis is able to uncover key determinants that have impacted performance and address why the effects of such dimensions resulted in significant changes in the performance of infrastructure service provision.

Over the last twenty years, while developed countries witnessed unparalleled rise in new regulations, developing countries complemented their privatization, with deregulation practices in various sectors, and devised regulatory frameworks, particularly for the utilities sectors. The study analyzes the impact of economic regulation on productivity and efficiency among the Latin American and Caribbean developing countries, assessing their gains from regulatory reforms. Basic choices for regulation engineering are examined, both successful contract practices, such as in Jamaica, or specific legislation in Chile, to disastrous regulation decrees in Argentina, and shows contract practices, to be the salient choice for most Latin American countries. The study reviews various practices, such as franchises and concessions, as modes of private sector participation and alternatives to regulation, analyzing the design of these arrangements for competitive marketability of their goods and services. Privatization restructuring and regulation concepts are examined, and a methodology spells out considerations for state-owned monopolies, prior to privatization. Finally, the challenge of regulation is revised, where lessons on regulatory design are examined, and an analysis on discretionary practices, re-negotiation and structural issues is presented, along with regulatory best practices.

'... the relationship between employment growth and output growth ... is greatly affected by the functioning, efficiency and institutional structure of the labor market.' - Joseph Stiglitz, Chief Economist, World Bank Despite the resumption of economic growth in most LAC countries since the late 1980s, improvements on the employment/unemployment front have been sluggish at best, with a few notable exceptions. In many countries, renewed growth in LAC in the 1990s has so far failed to generate adequate new jobs in place of those lost during the adjustment, and to restore wages to pre-crisis levels. The focus of this book is on: * the performance of labor markets in the LAC region since the beginning of significant structural reforms most countries in the region have undertaken; * the structure of labor markets, institutions, and incentive structures; * the effects of that structure on employment, earnings, income distribution, and poverty levels; * the role of labor market institutions in labor market trends; * the options for reform and the benefits of comprehensive labor reforms, as evidenced inside and outside the region; * labor policy reforms to improve in a sustainable way the employment/unemployment outlook.