Economists acknowledge the problems of regulated transmission but take different views about the likely efficiency of merchant transmission. This paper examines the evidence on alleged market failure and regulatory failure as experienced in practice in Australia and Argentina. In these examples,...

The oil industry is of great economic significance to many countries, and privatisations of National Oil Companies (NOCs) have often been controversial, as have been the benefits from privatisation more generally. We conduct a social cost-benefit analysis of the partial privatisation of...

Following the liberalisation of network industries there has been a number of innovations in incentive regulation. This paper examines the effects of the application of norm models within an ex-post incentive regulation of electricity distribution networks in Sweden. We first examine the...

This study empirically investigates the impact of privatisation on firm performance in the global oil and gas industry, where questions of resource control have regained widespread attention. Using a dataset of 60 public share offerings by 28 National Oil Companies it is shown that privatisation...

This paper explores the increasing private involvement in social infrastructure projects in the UK since 1979. It begins by reviewing the effect of privatisation on the quantity of investment undertaken by the utility sector. The evidence is consistent with the view that the private sector is...

This paper develops a methodology and uses household and labour survey data to analyse the extent of intersectoral outsourcing of the employment of specific labour-intensive activities in South Africa from 1997-2007. It is shown that the relatively high growth in services employment is driven by...

For most of the twentieth century, collective bargaining provided the terms on which labour was commonly employed in Britain. However, the quarter century since 1980 has seen the collapse of collectivism as the main way of regulating employment. Our argument is that the tacit settlement between...

Argentina’s 1992 transmission expansion policy was subsequently modified by, for example, including provision for transmission companies and proposing quality and substation expansions. There have been several such expansions, and no lack of investment in quality and reliability of supply. In...

Demsetz (1968) advocated competitive bidding as a replacement for natural monopoly regulation. Williamson (1976) and Goldberg (1976) argued that these problems of natural monopoly regulation are inherent in long-term investment under uncertainty, and that both long- and short-term franchising...

From 1992 to 2002, major expansions of the Argentine electricity transmission sector depended on users proposing, voting and paying for such expansions, which were then put out to competitive tender. Commentators hold this novel policy to have been unsuccessful, mainly on the ground that it...