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# **4. Impact of reforms on access rates**

This section focuses on the impact of reform on the first measure of utility performance: access. We first explain how and why we picked our specific performance proxies. We then move to a basic data analysis in which we describe their evolution between 1990 and 2002, distinguishing between groups of countries that have reformed and those which have not. This serves as a benchmark for a discussion of the extent to which the econometric analysis can provide additional insights.

## **4.1 Selection of access indicators**

There is disagreement in the literature on how to define access. Should it be a measure of the extent to which people have _the right_ to obtain, use. or take advantage of infrastructure services? Or, should it be a measure of _the actual_ consumption by users? There is no consistent approach across the three sectors.

In electricity, for now, the only information on access rates defined as an entitlement and available for a large number of countries is a survey conducted in 2002 by the International Energy Agency (IEA) that reports access for the year 2000. However, that information is not enough to estimate the panel data required by the econometric model. An alternative is thus needed. Generation capacity is often used as a proxy for access (Cubbin and Stern 2001; Zhang and others 2002 and 2005). We prefer to use levels of energy use per capita (expressed in kg of oil equivalent), defined by the IEA as “apparent consumption, which is equal to indigenous production plus imports and stock changes, minus exports and fuels supplied to ships and aircraft engaged in international transport.” The IEA measure yields a much larger dataset—but it has a cost. In the energy sector, any change in consumption, in particular in higher-income countries, may result from demand-management policies designed to reduce usage. In our context, such a reduction would be interpreted as a reduction in access, which would distort the real story.

In telecoms, there are multiple access indicators with time series available. The number of mainlines (see definition, below) is one of the most popular choices, sometimes accompanied by an indicator of mobile penetration.<sup>19</sup> We chose the number of telephone subscribers per 1,000 people, because it includes both fixed mainlines and mobile subscribers, better representing the market options available today. ITU defines this measure as the number of fixed lines plus the number of mobile subscribers per 1,000 people, where fixed lines are “telephone mainlines connecting a customer's equipment to the public switched telephone network,” while “mobile phone subscribers refers to users of portable telephones subscribing to an automatic public mobile telephone service using cellular technology that provides access to the public switched telephone network.” This indicator may over- or underestimate access because, as Wallsten (2001) explains, it is not possible to differentiate if one person has multiple lines, or if one line is used by multiple persons.

To measure access in the water sector, we use the percentage of population with access to improved water sources published by the Joint Monitoring Program (JMP), the 19 Examples can be found in Ross (1999), Wallsten (2001 and 2003), Fink and others (2001 and 2002), Gutiérrez (2003), and Li and Xu (2004).