Critical Infrastructure Protection in Network Industries

Recent disasters evidence that failures in key infrastructures may result in severe economic, environmental, and social losses, even human casualties. Therefore, it’s not a surprise that governments worldwide are increasingly concerned about robustness and resiliency of national and regional infrastructures to natural disasters, operational accidents and other disruptive events. This mounting political attention has resulted into numerous national and regional initiatives that aim to identify, designate, and protect critical infrastructures that underpin our daily life.

This issue of the Network Industries Quarterly is dedicated on the theory, and practice of critical infrastructure protection (CIP). The issue’s articles show that network industries produce several products and services that are vital for the modern societies, and that these industries are vulnerable to disruptions

We hope you’ll enjoy reading this theme issue and find the articles interesting and though-provoking.

Regulation and Performance of Electronic Communications

As known, the Digital Agenda for Europe contains 101 actions that will boost the EU economy and allow citizens and businesses to take the most out of digital technologies. While in some pillars a number of the Agenda’s Targets have been almost reached, in other pillars a lot is yet to be done. The articles in the issue investigate how far we are from reaching some of the Targets and what is the role that regulation could play in getting closer to them. The contributions focus on specific aspects of different topics, that is spectrum sharing, NGA, roaming and e-commerce, describing the status quo and analysing how current or foreseen regulatory interventions could enhance the performances of the existing electronic communication networks to the benefit of European citizens.

Trends in EU energy grids regulation

Concessions and their Regulation in the Different Network Industries

The use of concession agreements to provide public services in the different network industries has been growing over the past decades around the world, mainly as a way to facilitate private investment. Motorways, seaports, water and sewage, among other sectors, have gained experience in the use of these instruments and some important lessons have been learned. The articles in this issue highlight some of the most relevant considerations in the use of concession contracts, their advantages and disadvantages compared to the traditional public provision, the implications for institutional design, the way of dealing with new investments during the contract period, and how to introduce performance clauses.