Restructuring Public Utilities for Competition

During the past two decades, regulatory reform initiatives in the public utility industries have completely transformed the character of the public utility sector in many OECD countries. Although each public utility industry is different, with its own special features and unique regulatory issues, it is clear that certain key elements of those reforms are shared across a number of industries. Over the years, certain themes have emerged time and time again in the sectoral studies carried out by the Competition Committee. One of those themes is the key impact of industry structure on competition. This report tackles precisely this issue – the regulation of industry structure and its impact on competition. This report on restructuring public utilities draws on both submissions prepared by the countries themselves and from a large body of work by the OECD on regulatory reform – including the sectoral reviews carried out by the Competition Committee, the publications of the OECD’s Regulatory Reform Project, the work of the OECD’s TISP Committee in telecommunications, work by the International Energy Agency in the electricity and gas sectors and analyses by the OECD’s Economics Department.