The paper provides an overview of UK airports from the perspective of a business enterprise. Its object is to show, through the medium of the UK industry, that effective competition between airports is possible and that a competitive industry can be financially viable. In the UK case viability...

The extent to which firms face price-elastic demands for their products is important in the application of competition law and in judgments made as to whether they have significant market power. In the context of the airport industry, assessing price-elasticities is complicated by the fact that...

This paper draws on a recent report from Copenhagen Economics, with which both authors were involved, to argue that the European airport market has changed such that airports are now subject to competitive constraints from a number of sources. While these will bite differentially according to...

The paper provides an overview of UK airports from the perspective of a business enterprise. Its object is to show, through the medium of the UK industry, that effective competition between airports is possible and that a competitive industry can be financially viable. In the UK case viability...

© 2007 LSE and the University of Bath

Michael Beesley (1999) was critical of the approach used in the UK to regulate its major airports. In the case of Heathrow, in particular, he argued that price-cap regulation was inappropriate. In this paper David Starkie, after examining some unusual economic characteristics of the airports...

In the airports industry, there is a trade off between imperfect (or monopolistic) competition and economic regulation (with the latter introducing separate economic distortions). The nature of the imperfectly competitive market in the supply of airport services is examined and it is suggested...