Privatization in power sector: A comparative study of India & Argentina

Economic efficiency in the electricity industry in any country is important, as electricity is an engine of economic growth. In the past decade, developing and developed countries had embarked on the reforms in the form of privatization, competition and regulation across sectors to bring in efficiency reducing monopoly, reducing government bureaucracy, increasing competition, increasing efficiency and ensuring level playing field to all the players in an industry. Power sector too has steadily embraced these reforms. Internationally, privatization has been widely adopted to bring about economic reform in public enterprises. But at the same time it is engulfed with complex problems with each country having peculiar solution. These problems range from country to country as specific privatization models attract separate type of problems. All countries have tailored their methods of privatization reforms to the circumstances of their countries. Thus, the impact of privatization on the electricity sector may produce different results depending on the design and its implementation

India & Argentina both, have carried power reforms, but the methodology has been different. Using an original panel dataset for the period 1991–2008, The paper studies the impact of type of privatization on power sector in India & Argentina and try to find out which form of privatization has been more powerful in bringing the desired changes. The study is about describing the state of affairs in the electricity sector as it exists at present and has no control over variables; therefore Ex-Post facto research has been undertaken. A cross national policy sector approach has been used and the database for the present research is secondary.