The ongoing financial crisis has exacerbated concerns about the need to redefine the role and characteristics of regulation. In the case of public services, deregulation was justified by the benefits that would accrue to consumers, though scant attention was paid to actual consumer experience in...

This paper analyses the use of Services of General Economic Interest to which general access under equal conditions has been recognised as key for social and territorial cohesion by European policy-makers. In order to do so, citizens' preferences with respect to these services are analysed...

Public infrastructure services have been subject to dramatic regulatory reform since the 1980s in the European Union, particularly privatization, at the national level, and increased liberalization and deregulation, via the Single Market Programme. Despite this ambitious reform programme, there...

From the 1990s, two former telecoms monopoly incumbents — Telefonica of Spain and Telmex of Mexico — emerged as world player Multinationals and soon dominated this sector across Latin America. This paper argues that, in both cases, national champion policies by domestic governments coincided...

One consequence of the liberalization of certain services in the European Union was that a number of formerly inward-looking incumbents in telecommunications and electricity rapidly transformed themselves into some of the world's leading Multinationals. However, the precise relationship between...

In the face of continuing financial and economic crises in Europe, the European Investment Bank (EIB) has been criticized for being overly-conservative in its loans to Europe. Critics in particular have called on the EIB to vastly increase its investment in utilities as a counter-cyclical...