The paper provides an overview of UK airports from the perspective of a business enterprise. Its object is to show, through the medium of the UK industry, that effective competition between airports is possible and that a competitive industry can be financially viable. In the UK case viability...

© 2007 LSE and the University of Bath

Michael Beesley (1999) was critical of the approach used in the UK to regulate its major airports. In the case of Heathrow, in particular, he argued that price-cap regulation was inappropriate. In this paper David Starkie, after examining some unusual economic characteristics of the airports...