28 to know more specifically the size, type, and nature of the importance of the poverty problem in terms of infrastructure policy may be the main challenge to address over the next few years.<sup>32</sup> Indeed, when basic facts are known and can be studied, they reveal many misconceptions and prejudices which are not necessarily in the interest of the poor. More unfortunate maybe is that some facts well known from theory and supporting evidence are largely ignored in practice— although they may be _talked_ about a lot. For instance, to address the needs of the poor, there is an abundance of evidence to show that good economic regulation is needed. There is also plenty of evidence that regulation requires not only legal skills but also highly specialized economic skills to develop and use necessary regulatory instruments. Also, these instruments rely on a lot of the data needed to make the poverty oriented resource allocation decisions discussed earlier. This data is needed to design the right price/tariff structures and target subsidies to meet jointly the fiscal, efficiency and social concerns of policymakers (accounting for the monitoring and enforcement ability of the authorities).<sup>33</sup> Much of this data, the development of these instruments and the associated training can be, and sometimes have been, financed by loan preparation or technical assistance from donors but not often enough to get effective regulation if the high rate of contract renegotiation is any indication of the problem.

Ultimately, from the experience of the 1990s and the challenges identified in this survey, it seems that the main missing item on the reforms agenda so far has been a serious commitment to provide much more support to the institutional components of infrastructure reforms— particularly the regulatory component, which drives the equity and long-term viability of many operational reforms, including privatization; the design of auction and procurement rules in a sector where in competitive markets low-balling by bidders with limited implementation skills or in much less competitive markets high bids with bidders with strong ex-post negotiation skills; and the coordination between the institutions created or restructured as part of reforms. Effective regulation, procurement rules and institutions are needed to increase transparency and accountability and minimize the effects of corruption on the level, quality, and price of public services being delivered, often by public and private monopolies, to the world’s poorest people.<sup>34</sup> Much more is known from quantitative research on the infrastructure needs of the investment climate and long-term growth than on the needs of residential users, particularly the poor users and on the costs to the public sector of meeting the needs of all users.

Ensuring a fair balance in the monitoring of the winners and losers of reforms (or lack of reforms) will require much better coordination between donors. Indeed, the economic literature surveyed and donors’ policy statements point to a wide diversity of concerns and approaches in the infrastructure agenda for developing countries with little joint accountability for outcomes. While every donor is sovereign in its strategies, the incidence of coordination failures is on the countries, not on the agencies. Just as in the case of the MDGs, some basic quantitative agreement

> 32 The original baseline poverty estimates used for the MDGs were based on income and consumption distribution surveys for 44 countries containing 71 percent of the population in 1990 (Ghaiha 2003). These countries accounted for about a quarter of those considered to be developing. Ghaiha also documents the many sources of data and their inconsistencies.

> 33 These data and instruments can also be used to assess the regressivity of the use of infrastructure sectors as tax handles which seems to also be an emerging problem from the literature surveyed here.

> 34 At the same time, it must be recognized that in the context of privatization, when pushed too far, regulation is equivalent to a renationalization of the sector.