Person:
Irwin, Timothy Cressey
Author Name Variants
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Degrees
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Fiscal Affairs Department, International Monetary Fund
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Last updated
January 31, 2023
Biography
Tim Irwin worked at the World Bank from 1995 to 2008, on among other things the regulation of utilities and the link between public financial management and privately financed infrastructure projects.
Publication Search Results
1 - 7 of 7
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Publication
Avoiding Customer and Taxpayer Bailouts in Private Infrastructure Projects: Policy toward Leverage, Risk Allocation, and Bankruptcy
(World Bank, Washington, D.C., 2004-04)Many private infrastructure projects mix regulation that subjects the private company to considerable risk, a government or regulator that is reluctant to see the company go bankrupt, and high leverage on the part of the company. If all goes well, equityholders make a profit, debtholders are repaid, customers pay no more than they expected, and the government is not called on to bail the company out. If all goes badly enough, however, the prospect of bankruptcy will loom. Unwilling to see the company go bankrupt, however, the regulator will have to permit an unscheduled price increase, or the government will have to inject taxpayers' money into the firm. In other words, the combination means customers and taxpayers bear more risk than would appear from the regulations governing the private infrastructure project. The authors examine how these problems have played out in five cases. Then they describe how governments and regulators can quantify the extent of the problems and, using option-pricing techniques, value the customer and taxpayer guarantees involved. Finally, the authors analyze three options for mitigating the problem: making bankruptcy a more credible threat, limiting the private operator's leverage, and reducing the private operator's exposure to risk. The authors conclude that appropriate policy depends on the tax system, the feasibility of enforcing bankruptcy, and the benefits of risk transfer from taxpayer to the private sector. -
Publication
Public Money for Private Infrastructure : Deciding When to Offer Guarantees, Output-based Subsidies, and Other Fiscal Support
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2003-08)When governments seek private investment in infrastructure projects, they usually find themselves asked to provide grants, guarantees, or other forms of fiscal support. Often they prefer to provide support in ways that limit immediate cash expenditure but sometimes generate large costs later. Seeking to provide support without any immediate spending of cash, for example, governments often agree to shoulder project risks and sometimes encounter fiscal problems later. For example, in the 1970s and 1980s in Spain, the government was obliged to pay $2.7 billion when the exchange-rate guarantees it had given private toll roads were called (Gomez-Ibanez 1993). More recently, the Indonesian government agreed to pay $260 million as a result of its agreements, through the electricity company it owns, to bear demand and foreign-exchange risks in private power projects. Yet even when governments have chosen to provide cash subsidies they have not always achieved their apparent goals: for example, over 80 percent of the Honduran government's "lifeline" electricity subsidies go to customers who aren't poor (Wodon et al. 2003). In still other cases, governments' decisions not to provide support may have caused problems. -
Publication
Walking Up the Down Escalator : Public Investment and Fiscal Stability
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2007-03)Fiscal adjustment becomes like walking up the down escalator when growth-promoting spending is cut so much as to lower growth and thus the present value of future tax revenues to a degree that more than offsets the improvement in the cash deficit. Although short-term cash flows matter, a preponderant focus on them encourages governments to invest too little. Cash flow targets also encourage governments to shift investment spending off budget, by seeking private investment in public projects-irrespective of its real fiscal or economic benefits. To evade the action of cash flow targets, some have suggested excluding from their scope certain investments (such as those undertaken by public enterprises deemed commercial or financed by multilaterals). These stopgap remedies might sometimes help protect investment, but they do not provide a satisfactory solution to the underlying problem. Governments can more effectively reduce the biases created by the focus on short-term cash flows by developing indicators of the long-term fiscal effects of their decisions, including accounting and economic measures of net worth, and where appropriate including such measures in fiscal targets or even fiscal rules, replacing the exclusive focus on liquidity and debt. -
Publication
Price Structures, Cross-Subsidies, and Competition in Infrastructure
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 1997-02)Governments often regulate not only the overall level of prices charged by infrastructure firms but also the relationship between prices for different services or customers. Prices can differ among different types of customers, even when no customers can be said to be subsidizing another, for example, when one asset is used to supply a service to two or more groups of customers. One of the hurdles that governments must overcome in introducing competition in infrastructure is dealing with the social and political implications of changing price structures, or rate rebalancing. Generally, competition should reduce overall costs in the sector, lessening the need to compensate groups hurt by price increases resulting from rate rebalancing. But if the efficiency gains are not enough to offset the price increases for some groups and the government is worried about the political and social costs of rate balancing, it has three basic options: 1) preserving the old price structure; 2) funding price subsidies from general tax revenue rather than from transfers within the firm or industry; and 3) relying on social safety nets rather than price subsidies. Whichever option a government chooses should stand up against the following four tests: 1) Do subsidies reach the people the government most wants to support? 2) are the costs clear and measurable? 3) Are the administrative costs as low as possible? 4) Is the revenue raised from the source that entails the least cost to the economy? This Note looks at the three options in practice and reviews how they measure up against the four criteria. It concludes that governments should eliminate price subsidies if politically feasible. But even if they cannot, they can still reap the benefits of competition. -
Publication
Some Options for Improving the Governance of State-Owned Electricity Utilities
(World Bank Group, Washington, DC, 2004-02)Most government-owned utilities in developing countries perform poorly when judged as providers of electricity, in part because politicians and officials use their power, not to encourage the utilities to increase sales, improve the collection of bills, and cut costs, but to transfer resources to politically influential groups and, sometimes, extract bribes. To improve the performance of government-owned electricity utilities as electricity utilities, rules and practices must be changed in a way that reduces politicians' willingness or ability to use the utilities for political purposes and subjects the utilities to new sources of pressure to perform well. This paper considers ways in which a government might seek to achieve this goal without privatizing. It focuses on changes in corporate governance-that is, changes in the rules that structure the relationship between the company and the government as its owner. It concludes that governments should be cautious about the prospects for improvement without privatization-since, among other things, creating a truly arms-length relationship between the government and the utility will always be difficult as long as the government remains the utility's owner-but that improvements in corporate governance are still worth pursuing. -
Publication
Managing Contingent Liabilities in Public-Private Partnerships: Practice in Australia, Chile, and South Africa
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2010)Contingent liabilities create management problems for governments. They have a cost, but judging what the cost is and whether it is worth incurring is difficult. Except in the case of contingent liabilities created by simple guarantees of debt, governments usually can incur contingent liabilities without budgetary approval or recognition in the governments accounts. So governments may prefer contingent liabilities to other obligations. (The uncertainty surrounding contingent liabilities can work differently. It is well known that PPPs create contingent liabilities, and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, and others often warn of the risks. The initial reaction of a cautious Ministry of Finance may be to seek to avoid all contingent liabilities.) Management problems also arise once a government has incurred a contingent liability. Projects need to be monitored to reduce risks if possible. Spending on contingent liabilities must sometimes be forecast, despite the difficulty. -
Publication
Public-Private Partnerships in the New EU Member States
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2007)Public-private partnerships (PPPs) operate at the boundary of the public and private sectors, being neither fully public nor fully private. PPPs are defined in this paper as privately financed infrastructure projects in which a private firm either: (i) sells its services to the government; or (ii) sells its services to third parties with significant fiscal support in the form of guarantees. Despite these common elements of PPPs across sectors, there are differences in the type of arrangements that are typical in each sector. This study focuses on whether and when using PPPs can create fiscal space for additional infrastructure investments in the EU8. In doing so, the paper will examine the fiscal risks of PPPs and the role of fiscal institutions in this regard, including how these affect the use and design of PPPs and thus the potential for creating fiscal space while promoting investment in infrastructure. Chapter 2 distinguishes the illusory from the real fiscal effects of PPPs. Chapter 3 relates the extent to which PPPs reduce fiscal costs to the nature of fiscal institutions. Chapter 4 explains how fiscal institutions can be improved to encourage fiscal prudence in the use and design of PPPs. Chapter 5 concludes.