Political economy scholarship suggests that private sector investment, and thus economic growth, is more likely to occur when formal institutions allow states to provide investors with credible commitments to protect property rights. This book argues that this maxim does not hold for infrastructure privatization programs. Rather, differences in firm organizational structure better explain in the viability of privatization contracts in weak institutional environments. Domestic investors – or, if contracts are granted subnationally, domestic investors with diverse holdings in their contract jurisdiction – work most effectively in the volatile economic and political environments of the developing world. They are able to negotiate mutually beneficial adaptations to their contracts with host governments because cross-sector diversification provides them with informal contractual supports. The book finds strong empirical support for this argument through an analysis of fourteen water and sanitation privatization contracts in Argentina and a statistical analysis of sector trends in developing countries.

→Explains why developing country conglomerates and business groups perform better than multinationals in infrastructure sectors in the developing world

→Outlines the main political factors that affect the financial and political viability of long-term infrastructure privatization contracts

→Explains why new international property rights protections, such as international arbitration, do not work effectively in infrastructure sectors

Alison E. Post, University of California, Berkeley

Alison Post is Assistant Professor of Political Science and Global Metropolitan Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Prior to joining the Berkeley faculty, she was a Postdoctoral Fellow with the Committee on Global Thought at Columbia University, a Visiting Researcher at the Centro de Estudios de Estado y Sociedad in Buenos Aires and the UN Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean in Santiago, and a Researcher at the London School of Urban Research in London. Her doctoral dissertation won the 2009 William Anderson award from the American Political Science Association for the best dissertation in the general field of federalism, intergovernmental relations, state or local politics.