Advanced Search
MyIDEAS: Login

Privatizing Highways in Latin America: Is it Possible to Fix What Went Wrong?

Contents:

Author Info

  • Eduardo M. Engel

    () (Yale University, Faculty of Arts & Sciences, Department of Economics (Box 8268))

  • Ronald D. Fischer

    () (Universidad de Chile, Center of Applied Economics (CEA))

  • Alexander Galetovic

    () (Universidad de Chili, Center of Applied Economics (CEA))

Abstract

This paper reviews the Latin American experience with highway privatization during the last decade. Based on evidence from Argentina, Colombia and Chile, we find that private financing of new highways freed up fewer public resources than expected because public funds were often diverted to bail out franchise holders. Furthermore, many of the standard benefits of privatization did not materialize because of pervasive contract renegotiations. We argue that the disappointing performance of highway privatization in Latin America was due to two fundamental design flaws. First, countries followed a "privatize now, regulate later" approach. Second, most concessions were awarded as a fixed-term franchise, thereby creating a demand for guarantees and contract renegotiations. This paper also extends our previous work on formal models of highway privatization. We relax the self-financing constraint which ruled out the public provision of highways by assumption, and show that whenever the privatization of a highway is optimal, government transfers are undesirable. Alternatively, if government transfers are optimal, it is always the case that the full public provision of the highway should be preferred over privatization. We also model the role of flexibility and opportunistic behavior in highway concession contracts, and show that, by contrast with its fixed term counterpart, a flexible term franchise provides flexibility without inducing opportunistic behavior.

Download Info

If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the proper application to view it first. In case of further problems read the IDEAS help page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
File URL: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=441481
Download Restriction: no

Bibliographic Info

Paper provided by Yale School of Management in its series Yale School of Management Working Papers with number ysm417.

as in new window
Length:
Date of creation: 28 Jul 2004
Date of revision:
Handle: RePEc:ysm:somwrk:ysm417

Contact details of provider:
Web page: http://icf.som.yale.edu/
More information through EDIRC

Related research

Keywords: build-operate-and-transfer (BOT); concessions; cost-of-funds; flexibility; franchising; government subsidies; present-value-of-revenue (PVR); regulation; renegotiation;

Other versions of this item:

Find related papers by JEL classification:

This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

References

References listed on IDEAS
Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
as in new window
  1. Schwartz, Warren F & Sykes, Alan O, 2002. "The Economic Structure of Renegotiation and Dispute Resolution in the World Trade Organization," The Journal of Legal Studies, University of Chicago Press, vol. 31(1), pages S179-204, January.
  2. Engel, Eduardo & Fischer, Ronald & Galetovic, Alexander, 1997. "Highway Franchising: Pitfalls and Opportunities," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 87(2), pages 68-72, May.
  3. Oliver E. Williamson, 1976. "Franchise Bidding for Natural Monopolies -- in General and with Respect to CATV," Bell Journal of Economics, The RAND Corporation, vol. 7(1), pages 73-104, Spring.
Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

Citations

Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
as in new window

Cited by:
  1. Montoya, Miguel A. & Trillas, Francesc, 2007. "The measurement of the independence of telecommunications regulatory agencies in Latin America and the Caribbean," Utilities Policy, Elsevier, vol. 15(3), pages 182-190, September.
  2. Brenck, Andreas & Beckers, Thorsten & Heinrich, Maria & von Hirschhausen, Christian, 2005. "Public-private partnerships in new EU member countries of Central and Eastern Europe: An economic analysis with case studies from the highway sector," EIB Papers 10/2005, European Investment Bank, Economics Department.
  3. Albalate, Daniel & Bel, Germà, 2009. "Regulating concessions of toll motorways: An empirical study on fixed vs. variable term contracts," Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice, Elsevier, vol. 43(2), pages 219-229, February.

Lists

This item is not listed on Wikipedia, on a reading list or among the top items on IDEAS.

Statistics

Access and download statistics

Corrections

When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ysm:somwrk:ysm417

For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: ().

If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

If references are entirely missing, you can add them using this form.

If the full references list an item that is present in RePEc, but the system did not link to it, you can help with this form.

If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.