Publisher's Synopsis
This book is a revision of the author's text "Public enterprise economics". Since the mid 1980sin the UK major structural changes have taken place in every sector of the economy to which that previous book addressed. Public ownership has been replaced by regulated private ownership and the attempt has been made to develop new modes of regulation. There is however a basic core of normative economics that is relevent regardless of how these markets are regulated and the purpose of this book is to give an up-to-date exposition of this core. This consists of the application of concepts of economic efficiency to pricing and investment decisions. The book goes on to consider the relationship between the behaviour and the performance of a firm or industry and the regulatory framework within which it operates, contrasting public ownership, the US form of rate-of-return regulation and price cap regulation as it is evolving in the UK and USA. Particular use is made of principal-agent theory to carry out both positive and normative analyses of alternative regulatory systems.
