One important determinant of the speed and success of transition will be the efficiency of transformation and development of the infrastructure sectors. A great deal of attention has been paid to issues such as privatisation, restructuring, user prices, and terms of access in these sectors,...

This paper addresses the recent Mexico experience in the opening to competition in networks infrastructure mainly in the telecommunications sector. In spite of deregulation and privatization policies in the recent past, there are threats from regulatory failures which create obstacles in the...

This study examines the effect of research and development subsidies on the private funding of R&D in France. We address this issue from the annual R&D survey over 1985-1997, which provides information about the R&D subsidies given by all the ministries to the firms having at least one full-time...

The development of what one might call 'modern' systems of information and communication began with the Gutenberg printing press in the 15th century, and progressed through the prepaid postal system, electric telegraph and telephone in the 19th century, radio and television broadcasting in the...

In this study, the interaction between the competition-cooperation nexus and regulation in retail payment systems is analysed by applying the main lessons from the theory of network industries. This is justifiable on the grounds that the payment systems industry inherently has many...

This paper examines the economic rationale of the ideas of Gladstone & Chadwick on railway regulation and the legacy of their ideas. In 1844 Gladstone proposed and implemented what we would now call price and quantity regulation whereas in 1859 Chadwick proposed competition "for the field", i.e....

The setting of user prices for enterprises with large fixed costs and marginal costs below average costs – “natural monopolies” – raises important policy questions regarding both efficiency and equity. It has become well accepted among economists that, in a variety of settings, welfare...

One of the key determinants of China's ability to continue its economic growth into the 21stcentury and to distribute the benefits of that growth to a broad spectrum of the population will be the further development of its railroad system. This paper examines the possibilities for improving the...

As road pricing, telematics and logistics evolve, information and communication technologies (ICT) aim directly at making traffic flow more efficiently in a given infrastructure. Furthermore, the virtual world gives rise to new business fields and decentralised structures which affect the...

In its first steps toward reform of its huge and hugely important railway system, the Russian Federation has begun corporate restructuring of a kind favored by many students of railway reform throughout the world: some kind of separation of the entity controlling the infrastructure from the...