Abstract
This article evaluates EU policies on public services – particularly public network services – from the citizens' point of view. It is first argued that citizens' perceptions are important because the provision of fundamental services is at stake and because they constitute the infrastructure necessary for social and economic development. Citizens' 'voice' can, therefore, be known, analyzed and used in the design of improved policy on public services along with other indicators. Changing EU policy on public services is synthesized and classified into two main phases in section two. Citizen satisfaction with public services as revealed through surveys from 1997 to 2007 is explored in the third section. In the discussion, the prospects for EU policy on public services are considered and, it is argued that, from the perspectives of subsidiarity and proportionality, policy towards strengthening the common market is being increasingly uploaded to the supranational level in the form of directives, whilst cohesion and redistribution policies are being downloaded to the national level or dealt with at the supranational level by 'soft' instruments.
Highlights
Basic public network services - water, energy, transportation and communication provide essential services for life
Technological change has vastly reduced the requirements of high capital intensive costs for new entrants in some segments of the public network services, such as satellite, mobile telephony and cable technologies in the telecommunications sector, in the twenty-first century, important parts of public network services still exhibit non-competitive or monopolistic characteristics, such as intra-regional rail infrastructure, electricity transmission and distribution over high voltage networks, and water and sewerage
High fixed sunk costs associated with building the network continue to deter new entrants, reducing potential for competition, whilst economies of scope allow the largest firms to offer more services
Summary
Basic public network services - water, energy, transportation and communication provide essential services for life. A similar logic applies to energy and transportation In addition to these fundamental justifications as to why citizensopinions about public services are important, there are more specific ones, since public network services exhibit certain economic characteristics which render them different to most other sectors. In synthesis, these characteristics include: natural monopoly, resulting from the high capital intensive and long-term investment required to build a network; dynamic economies of scale and scope; network externalities, which are strategic for economic and social development of all other activities; public service obligations and information asymmetries.
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