Cheap, abundant and easy to transport and store, coal has been produced and consumed to meet people’s energy needs. The last decade’s growth in global coal use has been driven mainly by developing economies like China, whose phenomenal economic growth has been powered by coal-fired...

Auctions are playing an increasingly prominent role in the planning and operation of energy markets. Comparing the New Electricity Trading Arrangements to the former electricity Pool in England and Wales requires some analysis of the relative merits of uniform versus discriminatory pricing...

When access to monopoly owned networks is constrained auctioning access rights can increase the efficiency of allocations relative to negotiation and grandfathering when there is sufficient competition among network users. Historically, access rights to entry capacity on the British gas network...

Driven by fear of underinvestment in network assets, merchant investment in electricity transmission networks (MTI) is now legally allowed. Given that MTI is a real possibility, regulators face a new set of questions. After classifying different types of MTI, the paper raises and analyses...

Electricity transmission has emerged as critical for successfully liberalising power markets. This paper surveys the issues currently under discussion and provides a framework for the remaining papers in this issue. We conclude that signalling the efficient location of generation investment...

The Low Pay Commission is the institution created in 1997 to introduce Britain’s first National Minimum Wage. The paper places the Commission in historical perspective and provides a summary assessment of the initial impact of the Minimum Wage. It describes and analyses the development of the...

This paper proposes a model of workplace-specific unions that integrates two (conflicting) views of what unions do: one that unions mainly engage in rent extraction, the other that unions mainly engage in rent creation by providing agency services that increase workplace productivity. In our...

In this paper we describe the Spanish electricity industry and its current regulatory regime. Special emphasis is given to the description and discussion of market design issues (including stranded cost recovery), the evolution of market structure, investment in generation capacity and network...

We evaluate the cost-effectiveness of various policy options and infrastructure investment proposals to improve the security of gas supply in Bulgaria, one of the most gas insecure countries in the European Union. We do this by computing ‘security of supply cost curve’ for different gas...

It is puzzling today to explain diversity and imperfection of actual transmission monopoly designs in competitive electricity markets. We argue that transmission monopoly in competitive electricity markets has to be analysed within a Wilson (2002) modular framework. Applied to the management of...