Abstract
The recent history of the airline, telecommunications and electric utility industries years amply demonstrates the benefits of deregulation. It also demonstrates both the necessity of continued government involvement and its pitfalls. Prominent among the former are the efficient provision and pricing of infrastructure services, enforcement of antitrust-like policies and regulation of bottleneck facilities. The latter come down to an inherent tendency of regulators to engage in continued micromanagement—to continue to assume responsibility not merely for opening the door to competition but for ensuring that competitors go through it, and to prescribe the results they think an efficient competitive process would produce.
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Kahn, A.E. The Deregulatory Tar Baby: The Precarious Balance Between Regulation and Deregulation, 1970–2000 and Henceforward. Journal of Regulatory Economics 21, 35–56 (2002). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1013674607038
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1013674607038