Subjects:

Constitutional and Administrative Law

Contents:

PART I: INTRODUCTION

1. Introduction

PART II: FUNDAMENTALS

2. Why Regulate?

3. Explaining the Origins and Development of Regulation

4. How to Regulate: strategies

5. Who Regulates? Institutions and Structures

6. What is 'Good' Regulation?

7. Cost-Benefit Testing Regulation

8. Enforcing Regulation

9. Setting Standards

10. Self-Regulation

11. Regulating Risks

12. Regulation in the European Context

13. Regulatory Competition and Co-ordination

14. British Utilities Regulation: the basic structure

PART III: PARTICULAR CONCERNS

15. Price Setting in Natural Monopolies

16. Regulation versus Competition

17. Price Capping Mechanisms

18. Measuring Efficiency: benchmarking and yardsticking

19. Regulating Quality

20. Franchising and its Limitations

21. Accountability

22. Fairness and Procedures

PART IV: CONCLUSIONS

23. Conclusions

The way in which regulation works is a key concern of industries, consumers, citizens, and governments alike. This book takes the reader through the central issues of regulation and discusses these from a number of disciplinary perspectives. It has been written by a lawyer and an economist, but looks also towards business, political science, sociology, social administration, anthropology, and other disciplines. The fundamental strategies, institutions, and explanations of regulation are reviewed and the means of identifying ""good"" regulation are outlined. Individual chapters look at such topics as self-regulation, the regulation of risks, the cost-benefit testing of regulation, the importance of enforcement, and the challenge of regulating within Europe.;The second part of the book considers a series of issues of particular concern in modern utilities regulation, including the use of RPI-X price caps, the control of service quality, franchising techniques and ways of measuring regulatory performance. Questions of accountability and procedure are then examined and public debates on regulatory reform are reviewed.