Shaping markets through competition and economic regulation is at the heart of addressing the development challenges facing countries in southern Africa. The contributors to Competition Law and Economic Regulation: Addressing Market Power in southern Africa critically assess the efficacy of the competition and economic regulation frameworks, including the impact of a number of the regional competition authorities in a range of sectors throughout southern Africa. Featuring academics as well as practitioners in the field, the book addresses issues common to southern African countries, where markets are small and concentrated, with particularly high barriers to entry, and where the resources to enforce legislation against anti-competitive conduct are limited. What is needed, the contributors argue, is an understanding of competition and regional integration as part of an inclusive growth agenda for Africa. By examining competition and regulation in a single framework, and viewing this within the southern African experience, this volume adds new perspectives to the global competition literature. It is an essential reference tool and will be of great interest to policymakers and regulators, as well as the rapidly growing ecosystem of legal practitioners and economists engaged in the field.

Examines the political power struggles that have shaped the evolution of European competition regulation over the past six decades

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.

A substantially revised and updated new edition of the leading text on business and government, with new material reflecting recent theoretical and methodological advances; includes further coverage of the Microsoft antitrust case, the deregulation of telecommunications and electric power, and new environmental regulations. This new edition of the leading text on business and government focuses on the insights economic reasoning can provide in analyzing regulatory and antitrust issues. Departing from the traditional emphasis on institutions, Economics of Regulation and Antitrust asks how economic theory and empirical analyses can illuminate the character of market operation and the role for government action and brings new developments in theory and empirical methodology to bear on these questions. The fourth edition has been substantially revised and updated throughout, with new material added and extended discussion of many topics. Part I, on antitrust, has been given a major revision to reflect advances in economic theory and recent antitrust cases, including the case against Microsoft and the Supreme Court's Kodak decision. Part II, on economic regulation, updates its treatment of the restructuring and deregulation of the telecommunications and electric power industries, and includes an analysis of what went wrong in the California energy market in 2000 and 2001. Part III, on social regulation, now includes increased discussion of risk-risk analysis and extensive changes to its discussion of environmental regulation. The many case studies included provide students not only pertinent insights for today but also the economic tools to analyze the implications of regulations and antitrust policies in the future.The book is suitable for use in a wide range of courses in business, law, and public policy, for undergraduates as well at the graduate level. The structure of the book allows instructors to combine the chapters in various ways according to their needs. Presentation of more advanced material is self-contained. Each chapter concludes with questions and problems.

An exploration of the role that special interest groups play in modern democratic politics.

Organized, readable, technically sound and comprehensive from both theoretical and empirical standpoints, this book summarizes a vast amount of institutional, historical and descriptive detail.Using case studies from the US, Canada, Germany and Switzerland as well as the European Union and the global economy, this is the first book of its kind to e