Publisher's Synopsis
Britain led the way for much of the world with industrial privatization during the 1980s. Yet, the historical origins of the process that was being reversed have rarely been examined.;This volume is a coherent and thorough history of network industries such as railways, gas, water, and electricity, and telecommunications, which offers a valuable historical approach to the contentious issue of privatization. Industries such as these rely upon a substantial physical distribution network that "channels" their service from source to destination. They thus raise distinctive problems for government policy, as their requirement for some sort of unified system is incompatible with the co-existence of a number of competing service suppliers. Yet, competition has been the traditional guarantee of "fair" and minimum prices in British industrial policy. This tension between experience and ideology provoked a variety of government policies over the last two centuries.;The book provides an economic history of the network industries, which continue to play an important role in the British economy. The authors trace the development of various institutional arrangements from the early-19th century until the end of the 1980s, and provide quantitative estimates of their performance. Their book offers a useful historical approach to the contentious issue of privatization. James Foreman-Peck is the author of "A History of the World Economy" and editor of "New Perspectives on the Late Victorian Economy". Robert Millward is the author of "Public Expenditure Economics" and "Public Sector Economics".
