DEVELOPMENT-MALAWI: Water Becoming Crucial in Regional Integration

Malawi has scrapped plans to privatise its two water firms, at a time when water is becoming increasingly crucial in poverty alleviation and regional integration in Southern Africa.

URUGUAY: Referendum Gives Resounding ‘No’ to the Privatisation of Water

Uruguayan voters not only made a dramatic shift to the left in the presidential and parliamentary elections Sunday, but also approved a constitutional reform that defines water as a public good and guarantees civil society participation at every level of management of the country's water resources.

ENERGY-ARGENTINA: The State Jumps Back into the Market

A decade after the controversial privatisation of Argentina's oil, gas and power industries, the state is staging a return to the energy sector with a new company created to influence a market controlled by a handful of mainly foreign companies.

ECONOMY-BENIN: Cotton Firm Treads a Tortuous Path to Privatisation

The privatisation of state-owned enterprises is often fraught with difficulties – witness developments at Benin’s National Society for Agricultural Advancement (Société nationale pour la promotion agricole, SONAPRA), a cotton-processing firm.

BOLIVIA: Foreign Prices for Local Petroleum

The Bolivian government, with its hands tied by a promise to charge international prices for petroleum produced in the country by foreign corporations, agreed to a 100-day price freeze on gasoline after the biggest protest ever by the capital's transport workers.

ENVIRONMENT-BRAZIL: A Plan to Privatise the Amazon?

The debate has taken some unusual twists. There were rumours in the news media of a bill for ''privatising'' the Brazilian Amazon, when the intention was just the opposite: to halt the illegal appropriation of public lands by private parties, a phenomenon that accelerates deforestation.

ECONOMY-NIGERIA: Refineries That Aren’t Worth the Name

It has been dubbed the "paradox of plenty". Although Nigeria is the sixth-largest oil producer in the world, fuel shortages have become a common feature of life in the West African country over the past two decades.

AMERICAS SOCIAL FORUM: Explosive Mix of Oil and Free Trade

Ecuador and other Andean nations should not accept international trade tribunal rulings on their tax policy for foreign oil companies, as this implies renouncing sovereignty, said activists at the first Social Forum of the Americas, meeting in Quito.

URUGUAY: Privatisations Hit Troubled Waters

When Uruguayans go to the polls in October to elect a new president, they will also be asked to vote on ground-breaking constitutional reforms aimed at guaranteeing public control of the nation's water resources.

ENERGY-BOLIVIA: Voters Back Changes to Natural Gas Policy

A majority in Bolivia voted in favour of the proposed changes to the government's natural gas policy, according to the preliminary results of Sunday's referendum, which means the state oil company will regain control over the country's energy resources and the 78 contracts with foreign oil firms may be renegotiated.

ENERGY-BOLIVIA: Voters Set to Decide on the Future of Gas Reserves

Bolivian voters will go to the polls Sunday to decide how this impoverished country's huge natural gas reserves should be exploited.

ECONOMY-SOUTH AFRICA: Bringing the Margins Into the Mainstream

It is one of the most-discussed sectors of South Africa’s economy, but also one of the most difficult to define – encompassing everyone from collectors of scrap cardboard to the managers of tiny businesses.

ARGENTINA: Privatisation of Trains Derailed

The privatisation of Argentina's railways was a slick business deal in the 1990s for the companies that began to run the train service with subsidies from the state.

ITALY: Water Kidnapped by the Mafia

In Sicily the people are thirsty, but not because they lack water. The Italian island receives 7,000 cubic metres of rain annually, nearly triple what is needed to meet demand. But water trickles away, disappearing into the cracks created by poor management, corruption and the Mafia.

BOLIVIA: Deep Division Over Referendum on Natural Gas

A succession of ministers of mining and hydrocarbons in Bolivia have attempted to lead the process of reforming the laws governing the industry, since the country's president was forced to step down late last year by protests over natural gas policy.

OIL-MEXICO: Government Strangling State Oil Firm

Mexico's state oil company, Petróleos Mexicanos (Pemex), is sinking in a sea of debt and overwhelmed by a heavy tax burden, technological backwardness and a dearth of badly needed investment.

MAY DAY-BOLIVIA: Ex-Miners Recover Pensions with Dynamite

Former Bolivian miners, excluded from the pension system that emerged during the Latin American wave of privatisations, have won a meagre monthly payment of 60 dollars - but the price was one worker who blew himself up with dynamite and the threat of three more to follow his example.

ECONOMY: IMF to the Rescue of Global Trade

The International Monetary Fund is trying to coax developing countries, wary of western-dictated "free trade", to shelve protection of their own industries and embrace global trade liberalisation.

FINANCE-NIGER: Groups Say Partial Debt Forgiveness Inadequate

International creditors of the African nation of Niger have agreed to cancel 1.2 billon dollars of its debt over time under a controversial debt relief scheme, rewarding the country for its pro-free market economic restructuring plan.

ENERGY-ARGENTINA: Focus on Exports Leaves Domestic Market Short

Argentina's production and export of natural gas have grown unremittingly since the privatisation of the energy sector in the 1990s. But the failures of government regulation in that process, which left investment promises unfulfilled, are among the main causes of the country's current energy shortfall, say experts.

ECONOMY-INDIA: Privatisation Fails to Stop Massive Power Theft

More than a year after India's capital privatised the supply of electricity as a solution to massive power theft, the pilferage continues - thanks to silent political patronage.