Regulatory Governance Costs in Network Industries: Implicatins for postal Regulation

Martin Maegli and Christian Jaag

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: The various actors in regulated industries relate to each other within a broader institutional framework, i.e. by way of formal and informal rules. An important role in the implementation of liberalization processes is given to the regulation and thus to regulatory institutions. Regulation should have positive effect on social welfare. But state intervention also causes costs which we call costs of regulatory governance. These costs result from negative consequences caused by unnecessary regulatory requirements or from the implementation of inappropriate regulatory instruments. According to new institutional economics, these costs will depend upon the formal and informal rules among the involved actors, upon the allocation of property rights among these actors, as well as upon the various principal-agent or more generally contractual relationships among these actors. In this article we define an analytical framework of costs of regulatory governance. We distinguish between direct and indirect costs of regulation: Direct costs occur in relation with the institutional design of the regulatory framework and the behavior of actors. Whereas the indirect costs arise because of false incentives and finally turn out in an inefficient supply of goods and services. Using the example of the Swiss postal market we give an outline of a possible application of the framework.

Keywords: Regulation; Postal Sector; Regulatory Governance Costs; New Institutional Economics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D23 D61 K23 L51 L87 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009-04-27
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-net and nep-reg
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/15309/1/MPRA_paper_15309.pdf original version (application/pdf)

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:pra:mprapa:15309

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany Ludwigstraße 33, D-80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joachim Winter ().