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.

Regulation Under Increasing Competition brings together practitioners, regulators, and economists to examine the important policy and regulatory issues facing the telecommunications and electricity industries. This volume reviews such topics as competitive entry, stranded costs, pricing and market mechanisms. It provides a unique perspective on problems in a newly deregulated environment.

Clear rules of the game (e.g., established property rights and institutions of exchange) are important for innovation and entrepreneurship to flourish, but how those rules are defined is important. The scope and reach of federal regulation in the United States has been increasing over the last 30 years, and while federal agencies often try to quantify the benefits and costs of their regulations before they are issued, those measures are necessarily static, and bounded by data available to, and assumptions made by, the analyst. These analyses cannot capture the organic, dynamic nature of innovation nor anticipate how participants in a market might respond to incentives created by the regulation. Arguments that support “technology forcing” regulations often neglect the opportunities foregone when resources are devoted in a particular direction. Further, because regulations can confer competitive advantage on certain market participants at the expense of others, they provide incentives to focus innovative energy on influencing the rules, rather than innovating along more productive dimensions. Scholarship of the 1960s and 1970s showed that price and entry regulation tended to benefit organized interests at the expense of the broader public interest, and led to the economic deregulation movement that served to increase competition in several previously-regulated industries, with resulting improvements in innovation and consumer welfare. I hope to generate discussion of the effects of regulatory practices on innovation using current examples.

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.

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.

Any legal regime must attempt to assess the trade-offs associated with rules that will affect incentives to innovate, allocative efficiency, competition, and freedom of economic actors to commercialize the fruits of their innovative labors. The essays in this book approach this critical set of problems from an economic perspective.

The promotion of liberalized and deregulated markets by bilateral and multilateral aid donors, and by global institutions such as the WTO, has led to significant attention being paid to competition and regulatory reforms in developing economies. The process of reform involves the transfer and diffusion of market models derived from practice and theory in developed countries. However, in developing countries, regulation needs to do more than simply promote competitiveness and consumer interests: it also needs to ensure that the market nurtures development. By rigorously examining the numerous impacts of regulation, this book will help to fill a significant gap in the literature on economic and social development. The book, now available in paperback, draws together contributions from leading experts across a range of disciplines including economics, law, politics and governance, public management and business management. The authors begin with an extensive overview of the issues of regulation and competition in developing countries, and carefully illustrate the important themes and concepts involved. Using a variety of country and sector case studies, they move on to focus on the problems of applicability and adaptation that are experienced in the process of transferring best practice policy models from developed to developing countries. The book presents a clear agenda for further empirical research and is notable for its rigorous exploration of the links between theory and practice. Although there is substantial interest in competition and regulation, as yet there has been relatively little investigation of these issues in developing economies. This book redresses the balance and will be a valuable resource for researchers, academics, teachers and students interested in development economics and development studies. It will also be of great relevance for practitioners and policymakers working in the fields of competition policy and regulatory reform.