The provision of utilities for all at an affordable price has long been regarded as a prerequisite for everyday life, generally guaranteed by the state. But in recent years, publicly-owned utilities throughout Europe have come under increasing fire for their poor performance - their lack of...

Community legislation is unquestionably a factor to be reckoned with in member-state policy making. But the extent and mode of its impact on domestic policies and administrative structures will depend on the existing policy practices and the political and institutional structures of the country...

Notwithstanding an ever-growing body of literature on administrative reforms, the studies either focus on single countries or emphasize common tendencies in all countries; hence providing little systematic insight for the evaluation and explanation of administrative change from a comparative...

In the last decade the industrial landscape and regulatory structures of the network industries such as telecommunications, energy and rail transport, have undergone a profound transformation. Liberalization has fragmented the former natural monopoly sectors; new players with new preferences...

The article analyses the development of the national policies in both countries targeted to bringing renewable energy technologies onto the respective electricity market. Commencing with the empirical finding that in the course of the 1990s Germany proved to be more successful than the United...

The liberalisation and privatisation of network utilities lead to the establishment of regulatory regimes. On the national level, regulatory regimes not only include a highly visible single regulatory body, they also combine three institutions: a sector-specific regulatory agency, a ministry and...

How do barely incentivized norms impact incentive-rich environments? We take social enterprise legislation as a case in point. It establishes rules on behalf of constituencies that have no institutionalized means of enforcing them. By relying primarily on managers' other-regarding concerns...