Assessing the governance of electricity regulatory agencies in the Latin American and Caribbean region: a bench marking analysis
This paper focuses on an evaluation and benchmarking of the governance of regulatory agencies in the electricity sector in Latin American Countries. The authors develop an index of regulatory governance and rank all the agencies in the region. The index is an aggregate number of the evaluation of four key governance characteristics: autonomy, transparency, accountability and regulatory tools, including not only the formal aspects of regulation but also indicators related to actual implementation.
Although the region shows an overall good governance design of their regulatory agencies, the implementation of the independent regulatory model still faces several challenges. This is particularly evident in political autonomy and in the informal aspects of governance, where the region shows the larger number of countries with lower scores.
Trinidad and Tobago and Brazil show the best results and Ecuador, Honduras and Chile the poorest performance. The rest of the countries vary according to different indexes.
The authors observe four main patterns in governance of electricity regulatory agencies in Latin American countries:
- Regulatory agencies in the LAC region were originally created to isolate regulatory decisions from political intervention and this has been reflected in their governance design
- Nevertheless, the region has experienced difficulties in the implementation of the safeguards to guarantee the autonomous management of agencies
- Regulatory agencies of the region do not show a positive performance on institutional, non-regulatory, mechanisms aimed at improving its transparency and overall institutional quality
- The implementation of the independent agency model is context dependent
[Adapted from authors]
