Regulating of Infrastructure Industries in emerging countries

Regulating of Infrastructure Industries in emerging countries

This issue of NIQ is dedicated to some of the best papers presented at the 4th Conference on the Regulation of Infrastructures, which was organized by the Florence School of Regulation in June 2015. Selected academics and practitioners have been invited to Florence to discuss the latest developments in the regulation of different network industries, namely transport, energy, telecoms and water distribution around the world. Both the Conference and this issue of the Network Industries Quarterly have a special focus on emerging countries. Hence, this issue follows the path started by the Spring issue of the NIQ and extends the scope of the regulatory analysis to the emerging countries. 

The first article (Joe Tomain) brings a picture of the US and the historic transformation of the US energy policy. Ricardo Reis, Joaquim Sarmento and Joao Goncalves make an assessment of water utilitiesefficiency using the Portuguese case. The third article (Christian Jaag, Urs Trinkner, Jose Parra Moyano) focuses on the major challenges and opportunities for postal service providers. In the fourth article, Edson Gonçalves and Patrícia Sampaio present the railway privatization process currently undertaken in Brazil. The fifth article (Riham Ahmed Ezzat, Carlo Cambini, Carine Staropoli) looks at 17 Middle East North African (MENA) Countries along a period of 16 years (1995-2010), enquiring whether regulatory reform sequences matter for telecom sectors performances. 

We hope that you find these contributions interesting and we are looking forward to the next edition of the Conference on the Regulation of Infrastructures in June 2016!