Person:
Foster, Vivien
Author Name Variants
Fields of Specialization
Infrastructure Economics,
Energy Economics
Degrees
Departments
Energy & Extractives
Externally Hosted Work
Contact Information
Last updated
March 13, 2023
Biography
Vivien Foster is the Global Lead for Energy Economics, Markets & Institutions for the World Bank Group’s Energy and Extractives Global Practice. She has also held the roles of Sector Manager and Practice Manager, Strategy & Operations for the Practice since 2012. She was a core member of the team that developed and secured Board consensus for the Energy Sector Directions Paper in 2013. She positioned the Bank as a Knowledge Hub for the Sustainable Energy for All initiative developing a program of data-driven flagship global knowledge products, including the Global Tracking Framework and Readiness for Investment in Sustainable Energy, in collaboration with numerous external agencies. She promoted knowledge management in the practice through the establishment of two new Communities of Practice for Energy Efficiency and Energy Access, and created the Live Wire series of knowledge notes as a fast track for sharing and disseminating knowledge. At the Bank, she worked as a Senior Economist in the Latin America Region and Lead Economist in the Africa Region, leading a wide range of analytical, operational and corporate engagements; often cutting across infrastructure sectors and working on the macroeconomic and fiscal interface. In particular, she led the Africa Infrastructure Country Diagnostic a path-breaking knowledge program that covered 40 African countries and produced a large suite of influential analytical reports. She was lead author of “Building Bridges” an innovative analysis of the Chinese role in Africa’s infrastructure development, as well as “Water, Electricity and the Poor” focusing on the design of tariffs and subsidies to preserve affordability of services to the poor. A British national, Vivien joined the Bank in 1999 as a Young Professional. She previously worked as a Managing Consultant of Oxford Economic Research Associates Ltd in the UK, advising private and public sector clients in the water and energy industries, both in Europe and Latin America, focusing particularly on the economic regulation of utilities. She holds a Doctorate in Economics from University College London.
Publication Search Results
1 - 10 of 77
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Publication
Underpowered : The State of the Power Sector in Sub-Saharan Africa
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2008-05)Sub-Saharan Africa is in the midst of a power crisis marked by insufficient generating capacity, unreliable supplies, high prices, and low rates of popular access to the electricity grid. The region's capacity for generating power is lower than that of any other world region, and growth in that capacity has stagnated. The average price of power in Sub-Saharan Africa is double that of other developing regions, but supply is unreliable. Because new household connections in many countries are not keeping up with population growth, the electrification rate, already low, is actually declining. The manifestations of the current crisis are symptoms of deeper problems that are explored in this study of power sector institutions in 24 countries of Sub-Saharan Africa, which draws extensively on a new body of research undertaken as part of the multi-donor Africa Infrastructure Country Diagnostic (AICD). There are nearly 60 medium- to longer-term power sector projects involving the private sector in the region excluding leases for emergency power generation. Almost half of these are independent power producers (IPPs). Involving more than $2 billion of private sector investment, these IPPs have added early 3,000 MW of new capacity. A few IPP investments have been particularly well structured and contribute reliable power to the national grid. -
Publication
Private Provision of Rural Infrastructure Services: Competing for Subsidies
(World Bank, Washington, D.C., 2004-08)Market-oriented reforms of infrastructure in developing countries tend to focus primarily on commercially viable services in urban areas. Nevertheless, an increasing number of countries are beginning to experiment with extending the market paradigm to infrastructure services in rural areas that are often less attractive in commercial terms. In these cases, subsidies are used to close the gap between market requirements and development needs, and are increasingly determined and allocated on a competitive basis. The authors discuss the conditions under which competition among firms for such subsidies-successfully used in the telecommunications sector in a number of middle-income countries-could also be applied to electricity, water and sanitation, and transportation services in lower-income countries. -
Publication
Toward a Social Policy for Argentina's Infrastructure Sectors: Evaluating the Past and Exploring the Future
(World Bank, Washington, D.C., 2004-10)Argentina was a pioneer of infrastructure reform in the early 1990s. The social dimension of infrastructure services was typically overlooked in the reform process. However, social sensitivities often resurfaced in the years that followed, leading to a series of ad hoc social policy measures that cumulatively amount to US$200 million a year. Foster quantifies and prioritizes the social challenges faced by the Argentine infrastructure sectors, evaluates how well existing social policies are functioning, and provides illustrative simulations of how certain changes in the design of social policy could improve the performance of current social policies. The author's findings are that current social policies do not prove to be very effective in targeting resources to the poor. They have no real impact on the distribution of income across customers. An important reason for this targeting failure is the tendency to allocate resources to all households resident in a particular geographical area, irrespective of socioeconomic status. A series of simulations that limit subsidies to households reaching a minimum score on a multidimensional poverty index show that individual targeting of this kind potentially leads to a more progressive distribution of subsidies. However, the greatest improvements in targeting performance would be achieved if efforts switched from subsidizing the use of infrastructure services to subsidizing connections to those services. -
Publication
Does Infrastructure Reform Work for the Poor? A Case Study from Guatemala
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2004-01)Following the 1996 Peace Accords, Guatemala embarked on a major program of infrastructure reform involving the restructuring and privatization of the electricity and telecommunications sectors and a substantial increase in infrastructure investments partially financed by privatization proceeds. As a result, the pace of new connections to electricity, water, and sanitation services increased by more than 40 percent. Moreover, households in traditionally excluded sectors-the poor, rural, and indigenous populations-were twice as likely to be the beneficiaries of a new infrastructure connection than they had been prior to the Peace Accords. The teledensity index increased by a factor of five from 4.2 in 1997 to 19.7 in 2001, largely because of the growth in cellular telephones, which now outnumber fixed lines. The number of public telephones in rural areas increased by 80 percent since the Peace Accords, so that 80 percent of rural households are now within six kilometers from a public telephone. Although real electricity tariffs increased by 60-80 percent following the reform, residential consumers have been shielded by a "social tariff" policy that has kept charges at pre-reform levels. This policy, which costs US$50 million a year, does little to benefit poor households. The reason is that 60 percent of poor households are not connected to the electricity network, and those that are consume modest amounts of electricity and hence capture only 10 percent of the total value of the subsidy. In contrast, poor households without access to electricity pay about US$11 a kilowatt-hour (or 80 times the electricity tariff) to light their homes with candles and wick lamps. The resources used to finance the "social tariff" would therefore be better used in further accelerating the pace of new connections for currently underserved households. -
Publication
Ten Years of Water Service Reform in Latin America : Toward an Anglo-French Model
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2005-01)During the 1990s, most countries in the Latin American region undertook major reforms of their water supply industries. Chile was the first to attempt to modernize its water sector with new legislation passed as early as 1988. By 1991, both Argentina and Mexico were beginning to conduct a series of experiments with private sector participation (PSP). In a second wave, Peru, Colombia, and Bolivia enacted ambitious new legislation in the mid-1990s, and during the second half of the decade, reform began to take root in Brazil and Central America. By the end of the 1990s, nearly all countries had completed reforms, had major reforms in process, or were actively considering reforms. -
Publication
Understanding CO2 Emissions from the Global Energy Sector
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2014-02-24)The energy sector contributes about 40 percent of global emissions of CO2. Threequarters of those emissions come from six major economies. Although coal-fired plants account for just 40 percent of world energy production, they were responsible for more than 70 percent of energy-sector emissions in 2010. Despite improvements in some countries, the global CO2 emission factor for energy generation has hardly changed over the last 20 years. -
Publication
Information and Modeling Issues in Designing Water and Sanitation Subsidy Schemes
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2000-05)In designing a rational scheme for subsidizing water services, it is important to support the choice of design parameters with empirical analysis that stimulates the impact of subsidy options on the target population. Otherwise, there is little guarantee that the subsidy program will meet its objectives. But such analysis is informationally demanding. Ideally, researchers should have access to a single, consistent data set containing household-level information on consumption, willingness to pay, and a range of socioeconomic characteristics. Such a comprehensive data set will rarely exist. The authors suggest overcoming this data deficiency by collating, and imaginatevily manipulating different sources of data to generate estimates of the missing variables. The most valuable sources of information, they explain, are likely to be the following: 1) Customer databases of the water company, which provide robust information on the measured consumption of formal customers, but little information on unmeasured consumption, informal customers, willingness to pay, or socioeconomic variables. 2) General socioeconomic household surveys, which are an excellent source of socioeconomic information, but tend to record water expenditure rather than physical consumption. 3) Willingness-to-pay surveys, which are generally tailored to a specific project, are very flexible, and may be the only source of willingness-to-pay data. However, they are expensive to undertake, and the information collected is based on hypothetical rather than real behavior. Where such surveys are unavailable, international benchmark values on willingness to pay may be used. Combining data sets requires some effort and creativity, and creates difficulties of its own. But once a suitable data set has been constructed, a simulation model can be created using simple spreadsheet software. The model used to design Panama's water subsidy proposal addressed these questions: a) What are the targeting properties of different eligibility criteria for the subsidy? b) How large should the subsidy be? c) How much will the subsidy scheme cost, including administrative costs? Armed with the above information, policymakers should be in a position to design a subsidy program that reaches the intended beneficiaries, provides them with the level of financial support that is strictly necessary, meets the overall budget restrictions, and does not waste an excessive amount of funding on administrative costs. -
Publication
Supporting Hydropower : An Overview of the World Bank Group's Engagement
(World Bank Group, Washington, DC, 2014-10-03)Hydropower development makes an essential contribution to reducing poverty, boosting shared prosperity, and improving sustainability. Water storage associated with some hydropower projects can also make important contributions to water and food security and to climate resilience. The World Bank Group (WBG) thus uses multiple instruments to support sustainable and responsible hydropower projects of various sizes and types, depending on local need. But hydropower can also carry significant risks that must be carefully managed. Supporting sustainable hydropower is important for the World Bank Group, because hydropower potential exists where electricity is most needed. Hydropower production is the least-cost method of providing electricity in many developing countries. The WBG is committed to helping its clients continuously improve the way they approach hydropower so as to better manage its risks and better share the benefits of this renewable resource. Support for hydropower helps manage risks and can yield local, national, regional, and global benefits. Sustainable hydropower has three dimensions: physical, financial, and social/environmental. While a large amount of progress has been made on sustainability, particularly over the last decade, new challenges continue to emerge or become more pressing. These include: 1) securing multiple benefits from investments in hydropower; 2) managing cascades of projects to optimize additional benefits or to prevent exacerbating negative impacts; and 3) developing a more sophisticated understanding of land and water interactions. -
Publication
Designing Direct Subsidies for Water and Sanitation Services : Panama—A Case Study
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2000-05)As an alternative to traditional subsidy schemes in utility sectors, direct subsidy programs have several advantages: they are transparent, they are explicit, and they minimize distortions of the behavior of both the utility, and the customers. At the same time, defining practical eligibility criteria for direct subsidy schemes is difficult, and identifying eligible households may entail substantial administrative costs. The authors, using a case study from Panama, discuss some of the issues associated with the design of direct subsidy systems for water services. The conclude that: 1) There is a need to assess - rather than assume - the need for a subsidy. A key test of affordability, and thus of the need for a subsidy, is to compare the cost of the service, with some measure of household willingness to pay. 2) The initial assessment must consider the affordability of connection costs as well as the affordability of the service itself. Connection costs may be prohibitive for poor households with no credit, suggesting a need to focus subsidies on providing access, rather than ongoing water consumption. 3) A key issue in designing a direct subsidy scheme is its targeting properties. Poverty is a complex phenomenon, and difficult to measure. Eligibility must therefore be based on easily measurable proxy variables, and good proxies are hard to find. In choosing eligibility criteria for a subsidy, it is essential to verify what proportion of the target group fails to meet the criteria (errors of exclusion) and what proportion of non-target groups is inadvertently eligible for the benefits (errors of inclusion). 4) administrative costs are roughly the same no matter what the level of individual subsidies, so a scheme that pays beneficiaries very little, will tend not to be cost-effective. It is important to determine what proportion of total program costs will be absorbed by administrative expenses. 5) Subsidies should not cover the full cost of the service, and should be contingent on beneficiaries paying their share of the bill. Subsidies for consumption above a minimum subsistence level, should be avoided. Subsidies should be provided long enough before eligibility is reassessed to avoid "poverty trap" problems. 6) The utility or concessionaire can be helpful in identifying eligible candidates, because of its superior information on the payment histories of customers. It will also have an incentive to do so, since it has an interest in improving poor payment records. Thought should therefore be given at the design stage to the role of the service provider in the implementation of the subsidy scheme. 7) The administrative agency's responsibilities, the sources of funding, and the general principles guiding the subsidy system should have a clear legal basis, backed by regulations governing administrative procedures. 8) To reduce administrative costs, and avoid duplication of effort, it would be desirable for a single set of institutional arrangements to be used to determine eligibility for all welfare, and subsidy programs in a given jurisdiction, whether sub-national, or national. -
Publication
China's Emerging Role in Africa : Part of the Changing Landscape of Infrastructure Finance
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2008-10)In 2006, which China named the "Year of Africa," it quadrupled its investment commitments to infrastructure in Sub-Saharan Africa, to more than $7 billion. In 2007 China committed another $4.5 billion. Such funds could make a significant contribution toward meeting Africa's infrastructure investment needs. In the power sector, where Africa faces some of its largest gaps, China is investing $5.3 billion, including $3.3 billion in projects that, if completed, will increase the region's hydro generation capacity by 30 percent. China's growing role in Africa has generated much discussion. A new study seeks to add concrete numbers and solid analysis.