Privatisation Discontent and Utility Reform in Latin America

Privatisation faces strong and increasingly popular opposition in Latin America. This paper uses individual data on social attitudes, socioeconomic status and demographic information from three waves of Latinobarometro surveys (1998, 2000 and 2002) in 17 countries to study the role of privatisation of utilities and its distributional impact. We find that disagreement with privatisation is most likely when the respondent is on a low-to-middle income and when it involves a high proportion of public services such as water and electricity. This complements recent empirical research that points to distributional concerns in the implementation of privatisation in Latin America, particularly because of inadequate regulation of utilities.