The Limitations of Water Regulation: The Failure of the Cochabamba Concession in Bolivia

This article examines the limitations of governmental capacity to regulate private sector participation in urban water supply in developing countries through an analysis of the most dramatic failure to date of a major franchise contract for supplying water and sanitation services to a large city – the 40-year concession awarded in September 1999 to Aguas del Tunari (AdT) in Cochabamba, Bolivia. Five months later, the population rioted against water tariff increases and the contract was cancelled. The paper analyses the background, context and factors that explain the failure of the concession and seeks to draw lessons for the regulation of future concessions.     

Dental and Chronological Age in Children Under Oncological Treatment

The current oncology treatment has improved the survival of children with several types of cancer, and the effect of radiotherapy and/or chemotherapy treatment on dental maturation in comparison with chronological age is not widely known. The aim of this work was to evaluate and compare the impact of radiotherapy and/or chemotherapy treatment during dental maturation with chronological age in Chilean children diagnosed with cancer. Study Design was cross‐sectional study on children diagnosed with different types of cancer and treated with radiotherapy and/or chemotherapy when they were ages of 0.1 to 13 years. Demirjian tables for both girls and boys are used to determine the dental age. The association between chronological and dental age was highly significant. Nevertheless, a linear relation between chronological and dental age was not observed when the data were stratified by BMI and type of treatment. This study confirmed that dental age is an indicator of chronological age but that other variables, such as body mass index, in children with cancer could be confounder variables. Thus, further studies are necessary to investigate the influence of BMI on tooth eruption/maturation in children under oncological treatment.     

Is Small Beautiful? Testing the Direct and Nonlinear Effects of Size on Municipal Performance

Although the relationship between managerial capacity and local government performance is well established, research into the direct effect of population size on performance has yielded mixed findings. Using data for 787 municipalities in the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais, this article examines the direct and nonlinear effects (moderating and curvilinear) of population size on municipal performance. Performance is measured in terms of property tax collection and averaged for the 2005–07 mayoral administration. Mayor's age (a proxy for experience) and educational attainment serve as measures of managerial capacity. After controlling for political and economic factors, both municipal size and mayoral capacity are positively correlated with property tax collection. However, population size neither moderates managerial capacity nor relates curvilinearly to municipal performance. These findings challenge the promoters of fragmentation, which has been the trend in transitional and developing economies.     

Trust,regulation, and market efficiency

Building from the interest-group theory of regulation, we posit that trust alters the payoff from regulatory rent-seeking relative to profit-seeking. Trust reduces the costs of productive economic exchange by lowering transaction costs, thus raising the cost of rent-seeking behavior. In addition, trust increases political accountability, discouraging politicians from creating regulatory rents. We therefore hypothesize that trust reduces the extent of business regulation while simultaneously facilitating market efficiency. To test that hypothesis, we construct an overall business regulation index measuring procedures, time, and cost along eight dimensions of doing business in a country. The empirical results reveal that trust negatively relates to business regulation but positively relates to market efficiency. Interaction and split-sample results further indicate that trust and business regulation are substitutes. Collectively, the findings reported herein suggest that business regulation itself is not the root cause of market inefficiency, but rather lack of trust is the dominant factor.

     

Market Orientation and Public Service Performance: New Public Management Gone Mad?

The backbone of theory of the market‐based approach New Public Management is that market orientation improves public service performance. In this article, market orientation is operationalized through the dominant theoretical framework in the business literature: competitor orientation, customer orientation, and interfunctional coordination. Market orientation is examined from the vantage point of three stakeholder groups in English local government: citizens, public servants, and the central government’s agent, the Audit Commission. Findings show that market orientation works best for enhancing citizen satisfaction with local services, but its impacts on the performance judgments of local managers or the Audit Commission are negligible. The conclusion discusses important implications of these findings for research, policy, and practice.