Water, Electricity, and Telecommunications in the Caribbean: Benchmarking Sectors and Systems

Benchmarking represents one of the most valuable tools available to regulators. In island economies, the number of comparable infrastructure firms will be small—unless comparable data from other islands can be assembled. Of course, regulators must agree on data definitions and on procedures for sharing information for benchmarking to be a useful input in price reviews and in the development of incentive plans for state and privately owned enterprises. Furthermore, when benchmarking infrastructure sector performance, the analyst is implicitly (if not explicitly) benchmarking a nation’s entire regulatory system (which goes beyond the actions of the regulatory agency). Regional cooperation in data collection and analysis can reduce information asymmetries associated with regulation; simultaneously, more transparency on utility performance invites comparisons of regulatory performance across countries.