Cosmo Graham

This is a guide to the laws and policy underpinning competition law in the EU and UK. It integrates detailed discussions of the key legal principles at play in this dynamic area of the law with comprehensive analysis of the academic arguments and theoretical underpinnings of competition law and its development.

This book examines the implications for public law of the regulation of privatised utilities, asking how these institutions fit into our constitutional understandings regarding accountability, individual rights and territorial government. It argues that new approaches are needed if constitutional and regulatory principles are to accommodate one another. This is of particular interest in the context of recent constitutional reforms and the growing influence of European integration. After describing the institutions, their powers and duties, particular attention is paid to the position of consumers, the role of the European Community, territorial government and the place of individual rights. The book concludes by looking at price control, the coming of competitive markets for utility services and the future of the regulatory system in the light of convergence, multi-utilities and the government's planned reforms.

This is the first book to use a comparative approach to examine the effects of different constitutional and legal traditions on privatization. Cosmo Graham and Tony Prosser focus on privatization in the UK and France. They suggest that the British Government was remarkably free from constitutional limitation, whereas in France the written constitution imposed important restrictions on the scope of privatization and on the arrangements of the pricing of shares. They go on to describe the links created between privatized enterprises and government by devices such a golden shares and analyse the constraints of competition law and the regulatory arrangements in Britain. They also compare the British regulatory agencies with those in the US, looking in particular at the way in which the influence of Federal and State constitutions has led to the incorporation of significant elements of openness in decision-making procedures. This detailed analysis of the effect of legal constraints on economic policy adds a constitutional dimension to what has primarily been seen as an economic issue, and will make a unique and valuable contribution to current debates in political studies.