Energy Related Infrastructures

1A. Explain why nations are restructuring their basic infrastructures. Concentrate on electricity, or contrast differences and similarities with electricity, natural gas and telecommunications.

Nations appear to restructure energy-related (and other) infrastructures to improve operational efficiency of public utilities, and to improve the economic health of a given nation itself. By and large, restructuring means privatizing at least some part of the delivery of public utilities. Inefficiencies and waste that are typical of civil service management systems prevent or delay implementation of innovation. The fact that public utilities are single-origin resources in common use by a nation's population means that competition is limited. Civil service organizations, entrenched in monopolistic authority or management control, have little motive to transform methods of operation or systems of organization because the prospective benefit for doing so is limited. Further, civil service employment and administration also tends to involve the creation of secure jobs for more and more workers on the line far more than opportunity for their professional development; government-owned utilities "are nearly always accused of having excess employees per unit sold" (Cicchetti and Sepetys 100). Meanwhile, government administration of a public utility tends to drain rather than produce financial resources. Capital formation for construction could be drawn from national treasuries, whether the g

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s in Pakistan is unrealistic. Meanwhile, however, the pressure to modernize access to electrical power continues. This is why they suggest that a mixed form of government and private investment, in which the government offers certain guarantees (i.e., repatriating funds) to foreign investors, who would assume risks associated with power plant construction and electricity delivery, while liberalizing domestic banking policy to allow for long-term debt capital formation (107). It is a form of equity sharing that Cicchetti and Sepetys describe as pragmatic. The issue of government regulation surfaces more prominently in Peru, a developing country in which, over time, the government has systematically coopted, expropriated, nationalized, and concentrated. In 1972, "Electroperu, the national utility, was created when the Peruvian government abolished the system of private concessionaires" (Cicchetti and Sepetys 117). Historically, concentration of wealth had been in the hands of the foreign power plant developers, chiefly from Britain, Japan, and Italy; nationalization of electrical utilities meant that the concentration passed to the government. However, inefficiencies of civil service management that have been noted with regard to T

Category: Government - E