| Titre | Réglementation et concurrence : quelques éléments de théorie économique | |
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| Auteur | David Encaoua | |
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Revue | Economie et prévision |
| Numéro | no 76, 1986/5 Numéro Spécial. Déréglementation, privatisation et concurrence | |
| Page | 7-46 | |
| Résumé anglais |
Regulation and competition: some elements of economic theory, by David Encaoua.
This paper presents elements of economic theory which shed some light on the debate surrounding deregulation of some industries. It deals in particular with the cases of activities where competition is considered to be inefficient and/or impracticable: telecommunications, air and road transport... Until the midsixties it was tradtionally accepted that the flaws in market mechanisms which resulted from these weaknesses in competition justified a measure of government regulation in terms of controls on prices and on supply structures. Since then, however, this notion has come in for a certain amount of criticism, mainly in the United States, the critics arguing either that the mechanisms of regulation themselves are faulty or that the basic premise justifying the regulation of economic forces by the State is no more true.
The paper goes on to examine this latter type of argument by analysing the theory of contestable markets, which has come to be a new paradigm in analysing competition. The central issue is thus the following: can the threat of potential competitors entering the market and new technologies breaching boundaries of activity which form natural monopolies actually exert sufficient pressure for free market forces to lead to results which are satisfactory all round ? The situation of the natural multi-product monopoly which entails no sunk costs is examined in detail, in particular in terms of the cost allocation problem.
Finally, the paper examines to what extent the recent deregulation experiments in the United States confirm the predictions of the contestable market theory by studying the cases of the air transport and telecommunications industries.
JEL : Classification number 612 Source : Éditeur (via Persée) |
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| Article en ligne | http://www.persee.fr/web/revues/home/prescript/article/ecop_0249-4744_1986_hos_76_5_6011 |
