This volume focuses on incentive regulation and competition. While much of the regulatory action is taking place in telecommunications, the impact of competition and the resultant regulatory change is being felt in other traditional public utilities including electricity. The book reviews topics including price caps, incentive regulation, market structure and new regulatory technologies.

The past thirty years have witnessed a transformation of government economic intervention in broad segments of industry throughout the world. Many industries historically subject to economic price and entry controls have been largely deregulated, including natural gas, trucking, airlines, and commercial banking. However, recent concerns about market power in restructured electricity markets, airline industry instability amid chronic financial stress, and the challenges created by the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, which allowed commercial banks to participate in investment banking, have led to calls for renewed market intervention. Economic Regulation and Its Reform collects research by a group of distinguished scholars who explore these and other issues surrounding government economic intervention. Determining the consequences of such intervention requires a careful assessment of the costs and benefits of imperfect regulation. Moreover, government interventions may take a variety of forms, from relatively nonintrusive performance-based regulations to more aggressive antitrust and competition policies and barriers to entry. This volume introduces the key issues surrounding economic regulation, provides an assessment of the economic effects of regulatory reforms over the past three decades, and examines how these insights bear on some of today’s most significant concerns in regulatory policy.

This comprehensive Handbook presents thoughtful analysis on how regulations can impact innovation within a number of regulatory fields and markets, and provides a greater understanding of regulatory complexity and the challenging task it presents for future research.

This book is distilled from articles presented at two seminars held at Rutgers -- The State University of New Jersey on October 25, 1991, and May 1, 1992, entitled 'Economic Innovations in Public Utility Regulations'. These contributions represent the best new research on various topics in public utility regulation, including topics in antitrust law, the environmental impact of public utility regulation, incentive regulation, price-cap regulation, and contractual relationships.

This book explores the fundamental and inextricable relationship between regulation, intellectual property, competition law, and public health in pharmaceutical markets, examining their interconnections and the delicate balance between the various interests and policy goals at stake. Although pharmaceutical markets are heavily regulated and subject to close antitrust scrutiny, there is a constant requirement for existing rules and policies to tackle a number of persistent, complex issues. The variety of anti-competitive practices occurring in this sector, the worrying rise in drug prices, and major, far-reaching concerns over the accessibility of medicines are sources of frequent controversy in academic and policy debates. Understanding the unique features and dynamics of the pharmaceutical industry requires a tailored and multifaceted approach. The study is enhanced by the adoption of a comparative perspective, tracing convergence and divergence between EU and US systems through the analysis of relevant applicable rules, significant cases, and policy choices. Pursuant to this rigorous approach, the book provides an original and thought-provoking critique of the challenges of regulating pharmaceutical markets.

This eBook was born out of a general diagnosis that the US healthcare sector is not only one of the most studied industries in economics but also one of the areas where the field can make the most progress. Indeed, the American healthcare industry has many features that are particularly attractive to economists. It is one of (if not the) largest sectors of the US economy, accounting for almost 20% of the national Gross Domestic Product and employing tens of millions of workers. Firms range from large conglomerates to small providers, and there is strong government-private sector interaction, with federal, state, and local governments shaping policy. The industry also has many failures, is undergoing tremendous change, and produces a wealth of data (even if not always perfectly formatted). The field, however, is far from saturated. Healthcare is such a complex and intricate sector, one where details matter so much that it is almost its own subfield of economics. These high barriers to entry prevent scholars from researching healthcare topics and weaken the cross-pollination of ideas, an increasing hallmark of many other areas. This is problematic, not the least, because any major advances in healthcare economics literally save lives (and billions of dollars). This project aimed to help lower these barriers and kick-start broader collaborations.

Regulatory reform can spur innovations in infrastructure services, generating new downstream activities and magnifying the economywide benefits of reform. The national competition agency can help greatly in laying the groundwork for reform by making a compelling case for the reform's expected benefits.

The second of two volumes, this text discusses the vertical issues involved in regulatory reform. The contributors describe in detail the regulatory reforms which are needed or have been initiated in nine major industrial sectors, including automobiles, textiles and clothing, retail trade, chemicals, banking, road transport, telecoms, electricity and (scheduled) air transport. They argue that regulatory reform can, more often than not, help improve the competitiveness of companies while generating net growth effects for the European Union as a whole.

What role should governments play in protecting the environment and controlling the environmental impacts of industry? Do regulations benefit the environment? And how do they affect industrial innovation? Since the early 1970s, regulations have been used to coerce producers of goods and services into internalizing the environmental costs of production. These efforts have often faced opposition on practical and ideological grounds. Beginning in the 1980s, there has been a movement toward liberalization, coupled with the continued failure of the market to protect the environment as a public good. As a result, private and public sector interests have been debating the appropriate role of governments in protecting and improving the environment and controlling the environmental impact of industry. Using case studies from numerous countries, this book examines political and industrial trends and the responses to these challenges. The authors conclude that the complexities of environmental and economic relationships disallow universal solutions, and they stress the need for context-specific perspectives on the role of regulatory measures in environmental innovation.

The book examines innovation in environment-friendly technologies in the automobile industry. The focus of the book are Germany (a technology leader in the global automobile industry), on the one hand, and India, China and Brazil (technologically proficient emerging technology leaders) on the other hand. Patents have been used as a metric to measure and understand innovation. The book traces the evolution of regulatory standards in the automobile industry, relies on a unique patent dataset, and draws on a number of interviews conducted with regulators and engineers to get a better picture of how environmental policies and standards, including emission norms and fuel requirements, have developed overtime and now the industry has responded. The book’s core argument is that technological innovation is what has driven the industry in the past 125 years, but, at the same time, the industry has created problems and faced controversies with regard to its path dependency on carbon-intensive technologies. As a result, we have witnessed growing role of environmental regulators in ensuring that the growth path of the automobile industry, a powerhouse of growth of several economies, is aligned with the larger goals of addressing climate change and energy concerns. Against the backdrop of the emergence of Brazil, China and India in the global economy, the book focuses on the developments in these three countries, and draws parallels with Germany, which benefited from first mover advantage in technology and a substantial head-start in implementing cogent environmental policies. A standardized International Patent Classification (IPC) system has been used to, first, construct an index of regulatory stringency, based on regulations that came about between 1985 and 2010; and second, construct a unique cross-country weighted patent dataset for technologies invented in the past two and a half decades.