Privatisation Competition And Regulation In The United Kingdom

This volume brings together a number of papers discussing the interrelationship among privatisation, competition and regulation. The papers make reference to the experience of different countries with privatisation in a wide range of infrastructure sectors.

This title was first published in 2000. This work looks at the privatization of British Rail. It covers the competition for franchises and the regulation of those franchises. The study evaluates the extent to which the promotion of competition was an appropriate policy goal in the privatization of British rail. The book examines the rail system as a whole and looks at the prospects for the future.

This book focuses on the timely topic of private enterprises and regulation in the United Kingdom from both theoretcial and appled viewpoints. Papers cover such far-ranging topics as: privatizing public enterprises, new industrial policies, private versus public enterprise performance, asset sales and liberalization, franchising and competitive tendering, and financial implications and labor relations.

This is the first book to use a comparative approach to examine the effect of different constitutional and legal traditions on privatization. Focusing on privatization in the UK and France, Graham and Prosser suggest that the British Government was remarkably free from constitutional limitation, whereas in France the written constitution imposed important restrictions on the scope of privatization and on the arrangements for the pricing of shares. This detailed analysis of the effect of legal constraints on economic policy adds a constitutional dimension to what has primarily been seen as an economic issue, and will make a unique and valuable contribution to current debates in political studies.