Policy Brief 

Welcome to the Winter 2014 issue of the Network Industries Newsletter, which is dedicated to the topic of “Business Groups in Network Industries”. Business groups are generally understood as collections of heterogeneous companies tied together by formal and informal...

In recent years, corporate governance has been one of the most discussed issues among authorities, politicians, business people, scholars and commentators. Although this attention is particularly due to well-publicized governance failures and subsequent regulatory changes, this topic is an area of longstanding interest. OECD (2004) defined it as a set of relationships between a company and its stakeholders. Corporate governance provides the structure through which the objectives of the company are set, and the means of attaining those objectives and monitoring performance are determined.

The rail sector in Europe like other network industries is in a process of organizational restructuring that is part of different forms of liberalisation as well as de- and re-regulation. In this process many approaches to railway regulation are reassessed. Achieving more, better and more cost efficient rail services for freight and passengers is a commonly shared goal, but there are different opinions on the right policies to achieve this goal. Th is issue of the Network Industries Quarterly will look at different aspects of rail regulation with examples from in and outside the European Union.On the example of the Swiss rail reform Desmaris looks at the relationship between competition and performance. Kuligowska describes the recent reforms that the Polish rail regulator had to undertake when dealing with open access provision. Laroche discusses the issue of congestion of railway lines and how saturation of rail infrastructure can be modelled. Thiebaud & Amaral look at how prices influence coordination in the rail sector. Peña-Alcaraz et al. present an alternative view on capacity pricing in open access rail systems on the case of Tanzania.

This issue of Network Industries Quarterly focuses on the question of consumer involvement in the regulation of the network industries, a topic we have not addressed so far. The issue features four unique contributions, all especially written for this issue. They are based on presentations made by the four authors during the ACCC/AER Regulatory Conference 2013 held in Brisbane on July 25th and 26th 2013, and whose special focus was precisely on “Consumer involvement and pricing”. We would like to take this opportunity to thank the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) for having organized such an interesting conference and the authors for having agreed to write up their presentations for this newsletter.

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...