In this article, David Coen and Chris Doyle provide an overview of recent liberalisation and regulatory developments affecting key utility sectors (electricity, gas, postal service, and telecommunications) in the European Union. They examine what kind of competition is suitable in the utilities,...

This document (of 362 pages) contains the proceedings of a one-day roundtable exploring the regulatory and competition issues arising in the course of deregulation of the postal sector. The roundtable was held at the OECD in February 1999. The publication includes submissions from 16 OECD member...

What is a good balance between competition and coordination in network industries? Network unbundling aims to promote competition, but this has to be balanced against the downside of unbundling: firm-internal coordination falls away and must be replaced by external market mechanisms. This is a...

With the creation and implementation of the February 1997 World Trade Organization Agreement on Basic Telecommunications Services (the February Accord or WTO Agreement), the international telecommunications community has (at least on paper) promised ostensibly to move away from markets...

Over the past decade, Africa has been experiencing an economic resurgence. Yet, the continent is facing several difficult challenges and many economies of the region continue to be among the least competitive in the world. Africa's competitiveness is adversely affected by: (i) poor regional...

As the quantity and scope of regulations in Florida grow, so does the degree to which they affect the economy. In these circumstances, a little reform to the process of creating regulations can go a long way toward crafting an environment that fosters competitiveness and economic efficiency....

This paper discusses product market regulatory reforms in Italy over the past decade. Special attention is given to the underlying macroeconomic context for sectoral reforms and the role played by such reforms in consolidating the gains of macroeconomic convergence for entry into the European...

This paper reviews trends, outcomes and issues in regulatory reform in OECD countries. First, it summarises the evidence on the evolution of regulatory environments and the economy-wide and sectoral effects of reforms (including privatisation) in both competitive and non-competitive industries...

Using an efficiency-based framework, this paper analyses the performance of New Zealand's telecommunications sector under competition law-based sector governance (the period from 1987 to 2001) and under industry-specific regulation (2001 to 2007). The framework considers the productive,...