Download or read book Regulating Infrastructure written by José A. Gómez-Ibáñez and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2006-09-01 with total page 456 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the 1980s and '90s many countries turned to the private sector to provide infrastructure and utilities, such as gas, telephones, and highways--with the idea that market-based incentives would control costs and improve the quality of essential services. But subsequent debacles including the collapse of California's wholesale electricity market and the bankruptcy of Britain's largest railroad company have raised troubling questions about privatization. This book addresses one of the most vexing of these: how can government fairly and effectively regulate "natural monopolies"--those infrastructure and utility services whose technologies make competition impractical? Rather than sticking to economics, José Gómez-Ibáñez draws on history, politics, and a wealth of examples to provide a road map for various approaches to regulation. He makes a strong case for favoring market-oriented and contractual approaches--including private contracts between infrastructure providers and customers as well as concession contracts with the government acting as an intermediary--over those that grant government regulators substantial discretion. Contracts can provide stronger protection for infrastructure customers and suppliers--and greater opportunities to tailor services to their mutual advantage. In some cases, however, the requirements of the firms and their customers are too unpredictable for contracts to work, and alternative schemes may be needed.
Download or read book Natural Monopolies in Digital Platform Markets written by Francesco Ducci and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-07-23 with total page 203 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through three case studies, this book investigates whether digital industries are naturally monopolistic and evaluates policy approaches to market power.
Download or read book Regulatory Economics and Quantitative Methods written by Omar O. Chisari and published by Edward Elgar Publishing. This book was released on 2007-03-27 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Regulatory Economics and Quantitative Methods comprises original contributions by leading researchers working on issues relating to regulation in Latin America. They focus on regulation in infrastructure industries and attempt to show how quantitative analysis can contribute to more effective regulation. In particular, they discuss central issues relating to the measures used for benchmarking natural monopolies, incentives and contractual arrangements used in the regulatory environment and the impact of regulation and regulatory processes.
Download or read book Handbook of Law and Economics written by A. Mitchell Polinsky and published by North Holland. This book was released on 2007-11-21 with total page 992 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Law can be viewed as a body of rules and legal sanctions that channel behavior in socially desirable directions - for example, by encouraging individuals to take proper precautions to prevent accidents or by discouraging competitors from colluding to raise prices. The incentives created by the legal system are thus a natural subject of study by economists. Moreover, given the importance of law to the welfare of societies, the economic analysis of law merits prominent treatment as a subdiscipline of economics. This two volume Handbook is intended to foster the study of the legal system by economists. *The two volumes form a comprehensive and accessible survey of the current state of the field. *Chapters prepared by leading specialists of the area. *Summarizes received results as well as new developments.
Download or read book Reforming Infrastructure written by Ioannis Nicolaos Kessides and published by World Bank Publications. This book was released on 2004 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Electricity, natural gas, telecommunications, railways, and water supply, are often vertically and horizontally integrated state monopolies. This results in weak services, especially in developing and transition economies, and for poor people. Common problems include low productivity, high costs, bad quality, insufficient revenue, and investment shortfalls. Many countries over the past two decades have restructured, privatized and regulated their infrastructure. This report identifies the challenges involved in this massive policy redirection. It also assesses the outcomes of these changes, as well as their distributional consequences for poor households and other disadvantaged groups. It recommends directions for future reforms and research to improve infrastructure performance, identifying pricing policies that strike a balance between economic efficiency and social equity, suggesting rules governing access to bottleneck infrastructure facilities, and proposing ways to increase poor people's access to these crucial services.
Download or read book Free Market Zones written by Herbert G. Grubel and published by . This book was released on 1983 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Space Regulation in Canada Past Present and Potential written by Aram Daniel Kerkonian and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-03-24 with total page 436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Space is no longer the domain of national space agencies. Today, a significant majority of space activities are carried out by non-governmental entities, resulting in the accelerated evolution of space technologies and their applications. This operational shift from public to private does not mean, however, that governments are no longer relevant in this era of New Space. On the contrary: as the operational role of the state has diminished, its regulatory role has grown correspondingly. Acknowledging that the commercial landscape in space is an ever-changing one, this book explores how the Canadian government has adapted to the new commercial space landscape and whether it is prepared to fulfil its authorisation and supervision responsibilities as the regulator of Canada’s space industry. The fundamental research question posed, therefore, is whether Canada’s regulatory framework is appropriate given the increasing commercialisation of space. To best answer this question, the book provides a doctrinal analysis of Canada’s historical space policy and current space laws, an empirical survey of the perspectives of those currently interacting with Canada’s regulatory framework, and a comparative exploration of how other jurisdictions oversee commercial space activities. Motivated by legal, moral and economic considerations, the book recommends that Canada enact a comprehensive national space law and provides an annotated draft law for this purpose. By doing so, the book intends to spark a meaningful conversation on how Canada ought to fulfil its regulatory responsibilities, a topic previously unaddressed in public and academic discourse.
Download or read book Federalism and the Regulatory Process written by Richard Schultz and published by IRPP. This book was released on 1979 with total page 112 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Continentalizing Canadian Telecommunications written by Vanda Rideout and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2003 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: InContinentalizing Canadian TelecommunicationsVanda Rideout examines active political resistance to the radical, neo-liberal transformation of Canadian telecommunications that has been orchestrated by the federal government, big business, and their powerful lobbyists over the last two decades. Rideout focuses on the protection of the public interest, a crucial element neglected by most recent studies, and shows that although alliances have been formed between labour, consumers, and public interest activists, significant disagreements over issues such as free trade, long distance and local competition, and a targeted subsidy program for very low-income Canadians have meant that this united front has not been able to counter the forces of the new neo-liberal telecommunication policy regime.Continentalizing Canadian Telecommunicationsdetails the complex relationships between the various corporate and government interests, shows how the changes they brought about have locked Canada's telecommunications system into the orbit of the US system, and discusses the implications this has for Canadians.
Download or read book Law and the Sharing Economy written by Derek McKee and published by University of Ottawa Press. This book was released on 2018-11-27 with total page 559 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Controversy shrouds sharing economy platforms. It stems partially from the platforms’ economic impact, which is felt most acutely in certain sectors: Uber drivers compete with taxi drivers; Airbnb hosts compete with hotels. Other consequences lie elsewhere: Uber is associated with a trend toward low-paying, precarious work, whereas Airbnb is accused of exacerbating real estate speculation and raising the cost of long-term rental housing. While governments in some jurisdictions have attempted to rein in the platforms, technology has enabled such companies to bypass conventional regulatory categories, generating accusations of “unfair competition” as well as debates about the merits of existing regulatory regimes. Indeed, the platforms blur a number of familiar distinctions, including personal versus commercial activity; infrastructure versus content; contractual autonomy versus hierarchical control. These ambiguities can stymie legal regimes that rely on these distinctions as organizing principles, including those relating to labour, competition, tax, insurance, information, the prohibition of discrimination, as well as specialized sectoral regulation. This book is organized around five themes: technologies of regulation; regulating technology; the sites of regulation (local to global); regulating markets; and regulating labour. Together, the chapters offer a rich variety of insights on the regulation of the sharing economy, both in terms of the traditional areas of law they bring to bear, and the theoretical perspectives that inform their analysis. Published in English.
Download or read book Regulating Infrastructure written by José A. Gómez-Ibáñez and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2003-09-15 with total page 488 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This wide-ranging study of urban infrastructure “offers a series of fascinating arguments” in favor of market-oriented approaches to regulation (Times Higher Education Supplement). In the 1980s and ‘90s, many countries turned to the private sector to provide infrastructure and utilities—such as gas, telephones, and highways—with the idea that market-based incentives would control costs and improve the quality of essential services. But high-profile failures have since raised troubling questions about privatization. This book addresses one of the most vexing of these: how can government fairly and effectively regulate “natural monopolies”—those infrastructure and utility services whose technologies make competition impractical? Mapping out various approaches to regulation, José Gómez-Ibáñez draws on a wealth of case studies, as well as history, politics, and economics. He makes a strong case for favoring market-oriented and contractual approaches over those that grant more discretion to government regulators. He shows how contracts can provide stronger protection for infrastructure customers and suppliers—and greater opportunities to tailor services to their mutual advantage. At the same time, he highlights scenarios where alternative schemes may be needed.
Download or read book Canadian Energy Policy and the Struggle for Sustainable Development written by G. Bruce Doern and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2005-01-01 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In recent years, energy policy has been increasingly linked to concepts of sustainable development. In this timely collection, editor G. Bruce Doern presents an overview of Canadian energy policy, gathering together the top Canadian scholars in the field in an examination of the twenty-year period broadly benchmarked by energy liberalization and free trade in the mid-1980s, and by Canada's ratification of the Kyoto Protocol in 2002. The contributors examine issues including electricity restructuring in the wake of the August 2003 blackout, the implications of the Bush Administration's energy policies, energy security, northern pipelines and Aboriginal energy issues, provincial changes in energy policy, and overall federal-provincial changes in regulatory governance. They also demonstrate that, since per capita energy usage has actually increased in the past several years, sustainable development remains very much a struggle rather than an achievement. When the Kyoto Protocol and its requirements for reductions in greenhouse gas emissions are factored in, the Canadian record is especially dubious in basic energy terms. Canadian Energy Policy and the Struggle for Sustainable Development is key to understanding many of the issues in Canada's endeavour to live up to its energy-related environmental responsibilities.
Download or read book Perspectives on the New Economics and Regulation of Telecommunications written by Institute for Research on Public Policy and published by IRPP. This book was released on 1996 with total page 452 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume is a compilation of papers reflecting many of the issues related to telecommunications that are being debated today and are likely to continue to be addressed in the next few years. The papers examine the ways in which economic and technological forces are changing the regulation of telecommunications and the characteristics of the industry itself. After an introduction on issues such as the information highway, industry consolidation, market integration, and constraints on new policies, the papers cover such topics as the changes in Canadian telecommunications and their economics, the role of telecommunications in productivity and competition, the business network concept as an alternative governance structure, competition policy, convergence of technologies, separation of infrastructure from services, European telecommunications policy, and the historical context in which Canada has handled earlier transformations of a technological nature.
Download or read book Telecommunications the Demise of Natural Monopoly and Its Implications for Regulation written by Marion Wrobel and published by . This book was released on 1991 with total page 38 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This paper examines the demise of natural monopoly in telecommunications, its actual effect in the U.S., and its potential effect in Canada. It describes the American market after deregulation, the quality of service under competition, telephone price trends in the U.S. and Canada, regulation and the prospects for competition in Canada, and competition, pricing and the provision of universal service.
Download or read book Regulatory Capitalism written by John Braithwaite and published by Edward Elgar Publishing. This book was released on 2008 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this sprawling and ambitious book John Braithwaite successfully manages to link the contemporary dynamics of macro political economy to the dynamics of citizen engagement and organisational activism at the micro intestacies of governance practices. This is no mean feat and the logic works. . . Stephen Bell, The Australian Journal of Public Administration Everyone who is puzzled by modern regulocracy should read this book. Short and incisive, it represents the culmination of over twenty years work on the subject. It offers us a perceptive and wide-ranging perspective on the global development of regulatory capitalism and an important analysis of points of leverage for democrats and reformers. Christopher Hood, All Souls College, Oxford, UK It takes a great mind to produce a book that is indispensable for beginners and experts, theorists and policymakers alike. With characteristic clarity, admirable brevity, and his inimitable mix of description and prescription, John Braithwaite explains how corporations and states regulate each other in the complex global system dubbed regulatory capitalism. For Braithwaite aficionados, Regulatory Capitalism brings into focus the big picture created from years of meticulous research. For Braithwaite novices, it is a reading guide that cannot fail to inspire them to learn more. Carol A. Heimer, Northwestern University, US Reading Regulatory Capitalism is like opening your eyes. John Braithwaite brings together law, politics, and economics to give us a map and a vocabulary for the world we actually see all around us. He weaves together elements of over a decade of scholarship on the nature of the state, regulation, industrial organization, and intellectual property in an elegant, readable, and indispensable volume. Anne-Marie Slaughter, Princeton University, US Encyclopedic in scope, chock full of provocative even jarring claims, Regulatory Capitalism shows John Braithwaite at his transcendental best. Ian Ayres, Yale Law School, Yale University, US Contemporary societies have more vibrant markets than past ones. Yet they are more heavily populated by private and public regulators. This book explores the features of such a regulatory capitalism, its tendencies to be cyclically crisis-ridden, ritualistic and governed through networks. New ways of thinking about resultant policy challenges are developed. At the heart of this latest work by John Braithwaite lies the insight by David Levi-Faur and Jacint Jordana that the welfare state was succeeded in the 1970s by regulatory capitalism. The book argues that this has produced stronger markets, public regulation, private regulation and hybrid private/public regulation as well as new challenges such as a more cyclical quality to crises of market and governance failure, regulatory ritualism and markets in vice. However, regulatory capitalism also creates opportunities for better design of markets in virtue such as markets in continuous improvement, privatized enforcement of regulation, open source business models, regulatory pyramids with networked escalation and meta-governance of justice. Regulatory Capitalism will be warmly welcomed by regulatory scholars in political science, sociology, history, economics, business schools and law schools as well as regulatory bureaucrats, policy thinkers in government and law and society scholars.
Download or read book The Control of Natural Monopolies written by Richard Schmalensee and published by Free Press. This book was released on 1979 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Theory of Natural Monopoly written by William W. Sharkey and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1982-11-30 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The theory of natural monopoly has been substantially transformed in previous years. Ina clear and straightforward style, Dr. Sharkey gives an integrated presentation of the modern approach to this subject. Although the book is mainly conceptual in nature, the final chapter on natural monopoly in the telecommunications industry shows the practical applications of the theory. After an historical survey of natural monopoly, there follows a chapter stating and explaining the main results as well as giving a preliminary overview of the rest of the book, where concepts such as the subadditivity of costs, optimal pricing, sustainability, and destructive competition are presented. The essence of the subject is presented in a manner accessible to the general reader, though the book also provides a synthesis of the subject suitable for advanced students.