ABSTRACT
Although still highly disputed, public-private sector partnerships are becoming the dominant model not only in the water sector and not only in the developing and Eastern European countries, but in all infrastructure sectors and in the industrialised countries as well. Private sector participation is a very recent phenomenon, dating back essentially to the early 1990s. No matter what indicators one looks at, such private sector participation has only been increasing since then. For example, between 1990 and 1998 the World Bank tracked 1700 projects newly owned or managed by private companies in the water, transport and telecommunications sectors, and the total amounts invested increased from US$16 billion in 1990 to US$120 billion in 1997.1
If one looks specifically at the water sector, one finds an even more marked trend. Figure 7.1, for example, indicates the exponential in the amount of public private partnerships in supply worldwide between 1990 and 2000.
