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On 28 May, 2013, the Government of the Russian Federation adopted decree numbers 449 on the mechanism for the promotion of renewable energy (RE) on the wholesale electricity and capacity market. Decree numbers 449 integrates support for renewable energy sources for electricity (RES-E) into the capacity market. This is a very different approach to that applied in most of the existing support mechanisms in other countries, where RES-E is promoted on the basis of the electricity output (MWh) rather than the installed capacity (MW or MW per month) of RE installations. Promoting RES-E through the capacity market is a way for the Russian authorities to overcome some of the legal and technical challenges faced by previous support initiatives and, importantly, to control the costs of RE. This approach fits well with the specific regulatory architecture of the Russian wholesale electricity market, which comprises both an energy and capacity segment. This report introduces Russia's new capacity-based scheme and examines how the Russian authorities have integrated the variability of RE sources into the regulation of capacity supply. This analysis will highlight the risk of legal uncertainty affecting the business case for RE investors under the capacity-based scheme. For more publications on IFC Sustainability please visit www.ifc.org/sustainabilitypublications.

Electric Power --- Energy --- Energy Demand --- Energy Policies & Economics --- Energy Privatization --- Energy Regulation --- Public Investment --- Renewable Energy

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The serious implications of privatizing state-owned enterprises for politicians, managers, and investors make such decisions highly contingent on firm characteristics and past performance, complicating the identification of the privatization effects. A unique opportunity for this identification arises from a rule of promotion of local politicians based on age requirements in China. This paper finds that Chinese cities whose top officials were older than age 58 were 20 percent less likely to privatize local state-owned enterprises during the wave of state-owned enterprise restructuring starting in the late 1990s. Relying on the regression discontinuity design, the analysis finds that privatizations led to productivity gains of more than 170 percent, an order of magnitude larger than the traditional estimates based on the firm fixed effect specification (including its random-growth variant). The paper further finds that the privatization effects are significantly larger when the government is less involved in the affairs of local firms. The findings underscore the need to deal with the time-varying selectivity of privatizations and highlight the crucial role that state-owned enterprise privatizations played in China's economic takeoff.

Career Concern --- Economic Takeoff --- Energy --- Energy Privatization --- Enterprise Development and Reform --- Politicians --- Private Sector Development --- Privatization --- Productivity --- Public Sector Development --- State-Owned Enterprises

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This paper presents recent trends in government and foreign bank ownership across countries and summarizes the evidence regarding the implications of bank ownership structure for bank performance and competition, financial stability, and access to finance. The evidence reviewed suggests that foreign-owned banks tend to be more efficient than domestic banks in developing countries, promote competition in host banking sectors, and help stabilize credit when host countries face idiosyncratic shocks. But there are trade-offs, since foreign-owned banks can also transmit external shocks and might not always contribute to expanding access to credit. The record on the impact of government bank ownership suggests few benefits, especially for developing countries.

Bank Governance --- De Facto Governments --- Democratic Government --- Energy Privatization --- Finance and Financial Sector Development --- Financial Globalization --- Financial Intermediation --- Foreign Banks --- Governance --- International Economics and Trade --- Privatization --- State-Owned Banks --- Technology Industry --- Technology Innovation --- Trade & Services

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The power sector reform experiences of developing countries vary greatly. To help explain this from a political economy perspective, this paper reviews several dozen statistical analyses, multi-country case studies, and development practice publications. The frame of reference is the model of market-oriented reforms that became a global norm in the 1990s. Findings are organized in terms of the history, theory, motives, processes and outcomes of reforms. Market orientation emerged around the 1980s as part of a shift in economic theory and policy away from state control, and was expected to improve efficiency and investments. Reform advocates never took political economy issues into full consideration. Yet, policy makers have had sociopolitical as well as technical motives for reform, such as crisis response. International norms and competition for foreign investment and trade pulled governments to model reforms, while development partners pushed them as a condition of aid. Reform implementation has been characterized by strong tensions among different public and private interests. Concretely, 1990s model reforms were based on a logic of depoliticizing pricing and investment decisions; often placing policy makers in a conflict of interest situation. Thus, the political costs and risks of reform have often exceeded the benefits perceived by local decision makers, especially as reforms did not generally result in immediate benefits for citizens. In practice, incremental, inclusive processes may be better than quick and stealthy reforms that sidestep stakeholders' concerns. While there was limited evidence of efficacy at the time the reforms were implemented, ex post the outcomes of reforms are ambiguous, as improvements in some areas have been offset by negative results elsewhere. For increasing access to electricity and clean energy, 1990s model reforms may help, but they are neither necessary nor sufficient, nor did they focus on these objectives. In conclusion, the success or failure of policy prescriptions such as 1990s model reforms are contingent on dynamic, context-specific institutions as well as factors beyond the sector. More work is needed on integrated, flexible approaches to think and work politically in the sector, and to account for new technology and diverse sector development objectives.

Competition --- De Facto Governments --- Democratic Government --- Developing Countries --- Emerging Markets --- Energy --- Energy and Environment --- Energy Demand --- Energy Policies and Economics --- Energy Privatization --- Energy Sector Regulation --- Governance --- Liberalization --- National Governance --- Political Economy --- Power Sector Reforms --- Private Sector Development --- Privatization --- Public Sector Development --- Quality of Life and Leisure --- Regulation --- Social Analysis --- Social Development --- Unbundling --- Youth and Governance

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Pakistan's power sector underwent a substantial, if protracted, reform process. Beginning with an independent power producer program in 1994, the full unbundling of the national vertically integrated power and water utility, the Water and Power Development Authority, and the establishment of a regulatory entity, the National Electric Power Regulatory Authority, followed in 1997, paving the way for the eventual privatization of one major distribution utility, Karachi Electric, in 2005. Plans to privatize the remaining distribution utilities were shelved following the controversy surrounding the Karachi Electric transaction. A single buyer model has been in operation since the sector restructuring, with the Central Power Purchasing Agency fully separated from transmission and dispatch (the National Transmission and Dispatch Company) in June 2015. Despite these major steps, Pakistan has continued to suffer from inadequate capacity and other constraints, leading to large and frequent blackouts. At the heart of the impasse is the so-called "circular debt" crisis, whereby distribution utilities struggling to collect revenues and meet regulatory targets for transmission and distribution losses default on their payments to generators, and the sector is periodically bailed out by the government once losses accumulate to intolerable levels, at high cost to the exchequer. This dynamic has undermined incentives for utilities to improve their efficiency, while discouraging generators from investing in new capacity to address supply shortages. In the meantime, little has been done to accelerate access to electricity to the significant share of unserved population in rural areas.

De Facto Governments --- Democratic Government --- Electric Utility --- Electricity Pricing --- Energy --- Energy Access --- Energy and Environment --- Energy Demand --- Energy Policies and Economics --- Energy Privatization --- Energy Sector Regulation --- Power and Energy Conversion --- Power Generation --- Power Sector Reform --- Private Sector Development --- Privatization --- Public Sector Development --- Regulation --- State-Owned Enterprise