This article presents a quantitative approach to restructuring public and public utility enterprises, particularly during downsizing requests. The large number of employees in the public sector can be one of the causes for economic instability at country level. That is particularly visible in...

In advanced economies, state-owned enterprises play an important role in sectors of general interest such as energy and water supply. The conditions under which they operate have changed fundamentally since 1998, with new strategies required for firms to preserve market shares in the face of...

Due to potential abuse of the market power at wholesale and retail market level for natural gas the Federal Cartel Office in Germany prohibited further forward integration of gas importing firms with retail incumbents from 2005/2006 to 2010. The Authority argued that the very few dominant gas...

Competition in public utility sectors has been encouraged in recent years throughout Europe. In this paper we try and analyse the welfare effects of these reforms in Italy, with particular attention to water and energy goods. The first step is to introduce a sensible measure of affordability of...

Several studies have been conducted to analyze whether a regulation of the postal sector as a monopoly is actually efficient by examining its cost structure. The authors detected significant scale economies only in the delivery function and hence demonstrated a necessity for competition in the...

Like other network industries, the European gas supply industry has been liberalised, along the lines of what has been done in the United Kingdom and the United States, by opening up to competition the upstream and downstream segments of essential transmission infrastructure. The aim of this...

Zunehmend werden in Deutschland konventionelle Kraftwerke stilllgelegt. Dies trifft zum einen die Kernkraftwerke, aber auch alte Gas- und Kohlekraftwerke. Ein großer Teil der Erzeugungslücke kann durch erneuerbare Energien gedeckt werden. Allerdings entsteht dabei eine Residualnachfage, die...