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.

Financial institutions in developed countries have undergone a profound structural change in recent years. As a result, banking has become internationalized and competition has intensified within vast and complex markets for a range of financial services. This book reviews these changes.

Presents the results of an extensive enquiry into banking structures and regulations in OECD countries and assesses the most significant changes since the early sixty. Includes a history of deregulation and an inventory of relevant anti-trust laws, a set of definitions on financial regulation and competition policy and statistics on structural changes in financial systems.

This title was first published in 2003. This text aims to fill a gap in the literature for a text on the theory and practice of international regulatory competition in the open financial markets of the US and UK.

This edited volume is the first archival based historical investigation on the liberalization measures taken in various countries in the financial sector in the decades following the Bretton Woods system, from a comparative and a global perspective.

Financial intermediation and financial services industries have undergone many changes in the past two decades due to deregulation, globalization, and technological advances. The framework for regulating finance has seen many changes as well, with approaches adapting to new issues arising in specific groups of countries or globally. The objectives of this paper are twofold: to review current international thinking on what regulatory framework is needed to develop a financial sector that is stable, yet efficient, and provides proper access to households and firms; and to review the key experiences regarding international financial architecture initiatives, with a special focus on issues arising for developing countries. The paper outlines a number of areas of current debate: the special role of banks, competition policy, consumer protection, harmonization of rules-across products, within markets, and globally-and the adaptation and legitimacy of international standards to the circumstances facing developing countries. It concludes with some areas where more research would be useful.