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 27, 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 80
-
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
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
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
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
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
The Impact of Privatization on the Performance of the Infrastructure Sector : The Case of Electricity Distribution in Latin American Countries
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2006-06)The authors analyze the impact of privatization on the performance of 116 electric utilities in 10 Latin American countries. The analysis makes a number of contributions to the literature on changes in infrastructure ownership. First, this is the first systemic analysis of the impact of privatization on the distribution of the electricity sector. Second, it constructs an unbalanced panel data set of key indicators for each country. Third, it includes a broader-than in past studies-range of indicators, such as output, employment, productivity, efficiency, quality, coverage, and prices, offering a fuller picture of the effects of privatization on consumers. Fourth, this research covers a longer period of time, and evaluates three stages-before, transition, and after-allowing for the identification of the short- and long-run effects of privatization, as opposed to previous analyses' short time series data that do not identify long-run outcomes. Finally, the counterfactual is considered through the analysis in trends. The authors apply two different methodologies. The first methodology uses means and medians from each period and tests the significance of the changes between periods. The second methodology consists of an econometric model that captures firm fixed effects, firm-specific time trends, and heteroscedasticity corrections. When needed, the authors used firm-specific time trends to better understand the outcomes. The results suggest that changes in ownership generate significant improvements in labor productivity, efficiency, and product and service quality, and that most of those changes occur in the transition period. Improvements in the post transition period-beyond two years after the change in ownership-are much more modest. -
Publication
Is Cost Recovery a Feasible Objective for Water and Electricity? The Latin American Experience
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2006-06)Given the relatively small segment of the population that faces genuine affordability problems in Latin America, there appears to be a promising case for using targeted subsidies to reconcile the cost recovery objective with social protection concerns. Social tariff schemes of various kinds are already widespread in Latin America, but they suffer from a number of design flaws. Increasing block tariff (IBT) structures are the most prevalent form of social tariffs in the region. These are likely to be more successful in the electricity sector than in the water sector because the correlation between consumption and income is much stronger in the case of electricity than water. Moreover, IBT structures in electricity tend to be much better designed than in the case of water, with lower fixed charges, lower subsistence blocks, and steeper gradients. A number of more sophisticated social tariff schemes are also being applied that combine consumption criteria with some form of socioeconomic screening. These are generally found to perform better than IBTs, although they also present significant room for improvement. -
Publication
The Distributional Incidence of Residential Water and Electricity Subsidies
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2006-04)Subsidies to residential utility customers are popular among policymakers, utility managers, and utility customers alike, but they are nonetheless the subject of much controversy. Utility subsidies are seen as a way to help make utility service affordable for poor households and as an alternative mechanism for income redistribution. These arguments in favor of subsidies are countered by serious concerns about their adverse effects on consumer behavior, utility operations, and the financial health of utilities. Both the affordability and redistributive arguments for subsidies are based on the presumption that poor households benefit disproportionately from water and electricity subsidies, that they are well-targeted to the poor. The authors test this assumption by examining the extent to which the poor benefit from consumption and connection subsidies for water and electricity services. Their analysis of a wide range of subsidy models from around the developing world shows that the most common form of utility subsidy-quantity-based subsidies delivered through the tariff structure-are highly regressive. Geographically targeted or means-tested subsidies do better, and in many cases have a progressive incidence, but large numbers of poor households remain excluded. Low levels of coverage and metering severely limit the effectiveness of consumption subsidy schemes to reach the poor. Simulations suggest that connection subsidies are an attractive alternative for low coverage areas, but only if utilities have the means and motivation to extend network access to poor households and only if those households choose to connect. -
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
More Fiscal Resources for Infrastructure? Evidence from East Africa
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2007-06)This paper evaluates the extent of fiscal resource availability for infrastructure in four East African countries and explores the main options for its expansion. A number of major channels will be examined. The first is the extent to which expenditure is well allocated across sectors, sub-sectors, expense categories, jurisdictions and geographic areas. The second is the extent to which there is scope for improving efficiency by enhancing the operational performance of state owned enterprises (SOEs), restoring adequate levels of maintenance, or improving the selection and implementation of investment projects. The third is the extent to which user charges are applied and set at levels consistent with cost recovery. The fourth is the extent to which private sector participation has been fully exploited as a vehicle for raising investment finance. While it is difficult to evaluate these things very precisely, a number of proxy indicators are used to shed light on the matter.