Privatisation competition and regulation inin the united kingdom / G. Ganesh.

Chapter-1: The experience of United Kingdom;
Chapter-2: The gas industry in the UK;
Chapter-3: The electricity industry in the UK;
Chapter-4: The telecommunication industry;
Chapter-5: The airline industry;
Chapter-6: British steel;
Chapter-7: Privatization through buy-outs;
Chapter-Conclusions;

The UK experience of privatization has in many ways, been unique not only in its scope and extent but also for the various modalities of privatization tried out with various degrees of success. But above all the UK experience is unparalleled because it is the only country to have adopted a conscious policy of spreading the benefit of privatization among the public at large and enforced competition and regulation in a pre-determined way, so that benefits were maximised. The privatization process was usually preceded by restructuring the public enterprise aimed at converting it into one which would invite investment-this included splitting up the enterprises functionally to avoid privatization of public monopolistic organisations and creation of competition, so that the enterprises could achieve desired economic efficiency and benefit the consumers. However, where enterprises were privatised in their entirely, regulation served as surrogate competition to achieve the same objective. The UK experiment has proved that these methodologies have succeeded in benefiting the government, the consumers and the companies privatised. Government benefited from constraints on public sector borrowings on the one hand and earned substantial revenue from sale of its shares in public sector enterprises; consumers benefited from lower prices and better services and companies benefited from lower costs, more efficient means of production and meaningful autonomy to conduct their affairs. This is the reason why the UK experience serves as a model for countries wishing to privatise their public sector undertakings not only for the benefit of their Governments but for their citizens