Privatising public infrastructure within the EU: the interaction between supranational institutions, transnational forces and national governments

Hans-Jürgen Bieling and Christina Deckwirth
Additional contact information
Hans-Jürgen Bieling: Professor, Department of Political Science, Philipps-Universität Marburg
Christina Deckwirth: Research Assistant and PhD student, Department of Political Science, Philipps-Universität Marburg

Transfer: European Review of Labour and Research, 2008, vol. 14, issue 2, 237-257

Abstract: Building on research on ten European Union Member States, this article assesses the role of the EU as a driver of privatisation processes in five infrastructure sectors - telecommunications, postal services, railway transport, and energy and water services. Despite national path dependencies - such as economic structures, legal traditions and social forces - the EU is becoming increasingly influential in implementing a specific European regulatory model and thus is generating an emerging European infrastructure market. In spite of their success as global players, the new infrastructure transnational corporations have failed to deliver properly functioning services and to provide decent working conditions. Although political will on the European level to continue the liberalisation process stands firm, conflicts between national governments and the European Commission as well as an increasing Europeanisation of local and national social protests could undermine this consensus.

Keywords: privatisation; liberalisation; EU; public services; infrastructure (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2008
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/102425890801400206 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:treure:v:14:y:2008:i:2:p:237-257

DOI: 10.1177/102425890801400206

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Transfer: European Review of Labour and Research
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().