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This note examines one of the most fundamental questions to emerge from the Great Recession of 2007–9: how to regrow global economic growth going forward? Although all are painfully aware that it may be 2013 or 2014 before the global economy returns to normalcy, no one is sanguine about medium- to long-term growth prospects. For this reason, the challenging task of “regrowing growth” will take center stage for politicians and policy makers alike. One point is clear: without a resurrection of strong economic growth in major economies, the likelihood of rapid economic development in poor developing countries is diminished.1 How various elements will affect growth prospects is less clear, but vitally important. In the terminology of Hausmann and Rodrik (2003), this is a process of discovery and we are in somewhat uncharted territory.

Efforts to reform utilities can affect poor households in varied, often complex, ways, but it is by no means certain that such reform will hurt vulnerable households. Many myths have been perpetuated in discussions of utility reform - and in many cases poor households have benefited from reform. What is amazing is the extent to which governments, and their advisors - sometimes including multilateral organizations - fail to measure, anticipate, and monitor how the privatization of utilities actually affects the poor. Many questions must still be answered before good general guidelines can be drawn, but the authors offer many suggestions about how social, regulatory, and privatization policy, can increase the benefits of utility reform for poor households. The good news is that many measures can be taken to improve the chances that poor households will benefit from reform. Chief among these is promoting competition, where possible. Essentially what is needed is political commitment to doing the right thing. If policy is weak before privatization, it is going to be weak after privatization as well. Privatization is no substitute for responsible policy on redistribution.

The 'Chilean model' has been expostulated for some time in the Latin American and Caribbean region and elsewhere because it appeared that the country, despite terrible political and economic turmoil, embodied important lessons about economic management. Over the last 15 years, Chile has been the Latin American country with the most consistent and successful economic record. The success of Chile's economic reforms and the subsequent dramatic increase in real income are well known. To a large extent, Chile's positive fiscal outcomes have been the result of sound policies as well as sound fiscal institutions. However, there is room for improvement in the education and health sectors, and the results for Chile in terms of equality of income are not positive. 'Chile: Recent Policy Lessons and Emerging Challenges' presents a series of papers analyzing different aspects of Chilean public policy, which cover economic and social policies as well as regulatory and governance issues. The book is broken down into three parts: The first part examines the contribution of macroeconomic policies to superior outcomes; the second part analyzes the many advances in the social sector and the remaining troublesome issues; and the third part evaluates regulatory reforms and the effects of privatization. Since no public policy model is static, further reforms are needed to maintain Chile's economic growth as well as to respond effectively to public demands. As Chile grapples with its pockets of poverty, the balance between social safety nets and the need for greater efficiency in labor markets, a rebalancing of regulatory powers, and other thorny issues, it will need to rely on its institutional experience in public policy and conflict resolution.

The success with which middle-income indebted developing countries have gained access to private international finance in the 1990s is a tribute to their own domestic economic performance, international policy in dealing with the debt crisis of the 1980s, and innovation in international financial markets. Emphasizing the role of private infrastructure investment as a vehicle for attracting foreign capital to developing countries in the 1990s, the authors develop an analysis model to examine what determines the credit-risk premium on infrastructure projects in the country-risk environment of developing countries. They also provide tentative quantitative evidence of the importance of macroeconomic and project-specific attributes of project risk. Their key finding is that the market seems to impose a high-risk premium on loans to countries with high inflation and to projects in the road sector.