Regulating Public Services
Bridging the Gap between Theory and Practice

This book provides the tools needed to analyse the present and the future of economic regulation.

Emmanuelle Auriol (Author), Claude Crampes (Author), Antonio Estache (Author)

9781108833950, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 21 October 2021

500 pages
25 x 17.5 x 3 cm, 0.96 kg

'… an excellent book. It is well written, it covers a lot of ground and it is sensibly organised.' Nils-Henrik M. von der Fehr, Economics of Energy & Environmental Policy

Regulation is one of the tools used by governments to control monopolistic behaviour in the provision of public services such as electricity, transport or water. Technological and financial innovations have changed these public services markets since the 1990s, bringing new regulatory challenges, including technological and financial ones. This book demonstrates that basic regulatory theory and tools can address these new challenges, in addition to more traditional regulatory issues, both in developed and developing economies. The theory covered in the book is robust enough to guide regulators in multiple contexts, including those resulting from the effects of financial or political constraints, evolving market structures or the need to adapt to institutional weaknesses, climate change and poverty concerns that demand regulatory intervention. A bridge between theory and an evolving global practice, this book mobilizes the lessons of the past to analyse the future of economic regulation.

1. Introduction
2. Defining a theoretical normative benchmark
3. Thinking like a monopoly about price and output
4. Regulating a monopoly with full information
5. Regulating under informational constraints
6. Regulatory rules to set the average price
7. Linking regulatory theory to practice through finance
8. Nonlinear pricing in regulation
9. Social concerns in regulatory design
10. Regulating quality
11. On the regulation of investment
12. Regulating multiproduct oligopolies
13. Abuse of market power in (de)regulated industries
14. On the relevance of institutional quality
15. Emerging regulatory challenges.

Subject Areas: Economics of industrial organisation [KCD], Economics, finance, business & management [K]