What Does “Privatization” Do for Efficiency? Evidence from Argentina’s and Brazil’s Railways

Railway restructuring and privatization have now become a mainstream policy option in many developing countries. This paper provides the first analysis of the efficiency payoffs of railway reform for two developing countries, Argentina and Brazil. We track down the evolution of the performance of the private operators in both countries since reform, compare with the pre-reform performance when possible, distinguishing between the output and input sources of efficiency changes. This is done by computing the total factor productivity of each business unit since the regulators started collecting enough data.