This paper looks at the planning of privatization within government. It is based on the author's unique access to internal government papers in his role as the Official Historian of Privatization, as well as interviews with former ministers, government officials and industry management. The...

<title/> Regulatory impact assessment (RIA) involves a systematic appraisal of the costs and benefits associated with a proposed new regulation and evaluation of the performance of existing regulations. So far, most academic research has been concerned with the adoption of RIA in OECD countries. This...

<title/> Rate of return or cost of service regulation was the traditional means by which governments, especially in the USA, regulated profitability and prices in privately-owned public utility businesses. However, rate of return regulation was associated with efficiency disincentives. Hence, in 1983 a...

<italic>In October 2013, the Royal Mail (RM) was sold by the UK government through a public share offering. This was the largest privatization by value since the 1990s. The RM is facing competition in its core letters and parcels businesses and the coalition government concluded that its future best lay...</italic>

<title>ABSTRACT</title> Current cycle-network planning (CNP) at the local level tends to be dominated by a subjective-pragmatic approach in which it is only possible to consider a limited number of route alignment possibilities and development-sequencing scenarios. Although this method may produce acceptable...

The Conservative Government's 1988 Local Government Act extended compulsory tendering to a wide range of local authority services mainly supplied in the past by public departments in-house. This article reviews why the legislation was introduced; considers the evidence on efficiency savings from...

The Conservatives privatised most of the UK's state-owned industries during the 1980s and 1990s, but the Royal Mail remained under public ownership. It was privatised through a public flotation in early October 2013 when around 70 per cent of the company's shares were sold by the government....

In the last few years, there has been an extensive debate as to whether ownership matters for bank performance in less developed countries. This paper investigates whether privately-owned banks outperform state-owned banks and whether foreign ownership enhances bank performance. Based on a range...

Privatization has dominated industrial restructuring programs since the 1980s and continues to do so. This authoritative and accessible Handbook considers all aspects of this key issue, including: the theory of privatization; privatization in transition, developed and developing economies; as...

Regulatory economics has become increasingly important over the last quarter of a century, in part as a result of the wave of privatization, starting in the UK, which made the regulation of monopoly of much greater interest. The discipline has also become more rigorous, increasingly employing...