In recent years, several countries in Latin America, and around the world, have met the challenge of developing and expanding critical infrastructure by promoting private sector participation in the infrastructure sectors. Recognizing the relevance of the infrastructure sectors for the economic development of firms and industry and the well-being of the population, and given increasing constrai...

Public-private partnerships in urban environmental services have witnessed increased interest in recent years primarily to reform the weak performance of the public sector, reduce cost, improve efficiency, and ensure environmental protection. In this context, successful public-private partnerships require a thorough analysis of opportunities, a deliberate attention to process details, and a con...

The term, "non-governmental organization" or NGO, came into currency in 1945 because of the need for the UN to differentiate in its Charter between participation rights for intergovernmental specialized agencies and those for international private organizations. At the UN, virtually all types of private bodies can be recognized as NGOs. They only have to be independent from government control, ...

In a model of majority voting with common values and costly but voluntary participation, we show that in the vicinity of equilibrium, it is always Pareto-improving for more agents, on the average, to vote. This demonstrates that the negative voting externality identified by Borgers(2001) in the context of private values is always dominated by a positive informational externality. In addition, w...

In a simple model, we show that a joint venture can implement the rates of investment that maximize joint profit when firms’ research abilities are private information. This can be done with budget balance, even though there are participation constraints. There is no conflict between budget balance and participation constraints because firms’ payoffs can depend on ex post signals of abilities. ...

Using data from the 1990 panel of the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP), we address the question: Did the Medicaid expansions for children cause declines in private coverage? We use a multivariate approach that attributes a displacement effect to declines in private coverage for children targeted by the Medicaid expansions exceeding declines for a comparison group of older low-i...