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.

Institutional Reform of Air Navigation Service Providers deals with the changes that have taken place in this major, technologically progressive industry as many countries moved away from direct provision by the government to forms of corporate or private provision. The author provides an up-to-date institutional and economic analysis of air navigation service providers’ efforts to reform their governance and funding structures under these changes. The book discusses air navigation service providers in great detail, with a focus on the historical evolution of the industry’s institutional and regulatory frameworks as well as the ongoing developments in the industry (e.g. the Single European Sky in Europe and NextGen in the US). The author departs from the more conventional quasi-descriptive analysis by performing economic and econometric analyses of the industry that explicitly include institutional variables, e.g. to explore whether the nature of ownership can be associated with different economic efficiency outcomes. The result is a rigorous assessment of the structures of various air navigation service providers, strengthened by the use of case studies and policy analysis of potential reform. The theme and scope of this book will appeal to anyone interested in the institutional and regulatory history of air navigation service providers, and its accessible approach will appeal to policy-makers and professionals as well as people who are interested, more broadly, in economic regulation.