The changing nature of administrating public networks
By: BAUER, Michael W
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ArticlePublisher: Braga : Escola de Economia e Gestão da Universidade do Minho, 2003Revista de Administração e Políticas Públicas 4, 1-2, p. 8-41Abstract: The retreat of the state has been one prospect of the reform of public utilities in the 1980s and 1990s. Contributing to the discussion whether such a retreat is what we can observe ( or what we should still expect), this article attempts to analyse the involvement of public authorities in post-reform utility regimes in the United Kingdom and Germany. Therefore in a first step a analytical concept of administrative costs rooted in three different theories is developed. It is suggested to understand administrative costs in particular, first, as such efforts public authorities invest in sustaining fair competition ( sustaining markets'), second, as attempts to set incentives for private actors to provide common goods ('incentivisation'), and, finally, deriving from the necessity to organise the co-ordination of public action ('administrative co-ordination'). In a second step, the concept is applied to the qualitive investigation of recent developments in the telecommunications,electricity and railways sectors in Germany and the United Kingdom. Studying the involvement and transformation of public authority within the three dimension will open a systematic way to weigh the residual and empirically observable public engagement in the regulation of the reformed utilities
The retreat of the state has been one prospect of the reform of public utilities in the 1980s and 1990s. Contributing to the discussion whether such a retreat is what we can observe ( or what we should still expect), this article attempts to analyse the involvement of public authorities in post-reform utility regimes in the United Kingdom and Germany. Therefore in a first step a analytical concept of administrative costs rooted in three different theories is developed. It is suggested to understand administrative costs in particular, first, as such efforts public authorities invest in sustaining fair competition ( sustaining markets'), second, as attempts to set incentives for private actors to provide common goods ('incentivisation'), and, finally, deriving from the necessity to organise the co-ordination of public action ('administrative co-ordination'). In a second step, the concept is applied to the qualitive investigation of recent developments in the telecommunications,electricity and railways sectors in Germany and the United Kingdom. Studying the involvement and transformation of public authority within the three dimension will open a systematic way to weigh the residual and empirically observable public engagement in the regulation of the reformed utilities
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