Economic Deregulation Research Articles

A liberalised South African airline industry: Measuring airline total-factor productivity

The liberalisation of the South African airline industry through economic deregulation established competitive domestic and international markets. Sustainability of air transport, subject to these liberalisation effects, depends on efficient management information such as total-factor productivity, which necessitates comprehensive financial and operational information. Total-factor productivity in general, however, is not utilised by airlines as a key performance indicator since the measuring thereof is complex and regarded as tedious. Changes in air transport total-factor productivity can be measured in two ways. First, an index approach can be adopted that shows the proportional change in the inputs in relation to a proportional change in output. Secondly, a production function can be determined (econometric approach) that shows a change of productivity as a shift in the production curve. The research on which the article is based, exploited the theory, selection and application of an appropriate approach to determine changes of total-factor productivity of an individual airline to assist/support efficient decisionmaking by management.

A Waste of Space: Bodies, Time and Urban Renewal

A Waste of Space: Bodies, Time and Urban Renewal

Rail safety and rail privatisation in Japan

Over the period from 1980 to the present, the economic status of the main line railway systems in many developed countries has changed, by privatisation or economic deregulation or both. The principal aims of such changes have been to improve the economic performance of the railways, and not to change the safety performance. Nevertheless, it is recognised that changing the organisational structure of railways might affect safety. The empirical evidence of the effect of restructuring on safety is limited, both in railways and in other industries. This paper adds to the empirical evidence by analysing train accidents in Japan before and after the privatisation of the Japanese National Railways (JNR) in 1987. The paper finds that the JNR achieved downward trends in the mean number of train accidents per train-kilometre in the 16 years 1971–1986, and the paper takes the extrapolation of these favourable trends as the yardstick by which to judge the safety performance of the privatised railways. The paper finds that the privatised railway had fewer train accidents in total than this yardstick in 1987–2006. This finding applies whether or not the high-speed Shinkansen train operations are included. Thus there is no evidence that rail privatisation in Japan had an adverse effect on train accidents. The methods adopted and the results are similar to those previously found by the author for rail privatisation in Great Britain.

Public policy consulting in an emerging Indian framework

This paper seeks to highlight the milestones, influences and current imperatives in the transition from interest group lobbying to professional public affairs practice in India, an emerging and attractive market for global capital. It traces the ecosystem of business-government relations in independent India, through the phases of economic liberalisation and partial deregulation, right up till the present stage of independent regulators and consultative processes in policymaking. It examines the roles of the bureaucracy and political leadership and other stakeholders in Indian policy making. Finally, it argues how the conventional murky connotations of lobbying in a system which still retains a fair degree of discretionary powers with the government is evolving into transparent professional public affairs practice led by domain expertise and fact-based analysis.

Economic Deregulation and Supply Response of Cocoa Farmers in Nigeria

The effect of deregulation on the supply response of cocoa farmers in Nigeria was analyzed using the ECM approach. Time series data (i.e. 1970-2000) were compiled and a functional relationship was established using OLS technique. The data were tested for their time series characteristics using the DF/ADF tests. Preliminary analysis suggested that estimations based on their levels might be spurious. Results indicated that almost all the variables in the model were not stationary at their levels. Further results revealed that higher prices received by producers affected cocoa output. Moreover, statistical significance of the error correction term confirmed the existence of an equilibrium relationship among the variables. More importantly, the deregulation period's policy instruments instituted in Nigeria, favored cocoa production. Consequently, policies encouraging domestic price alignment with world prices are recommended.

An “Arranged Love” Marriage: India's Neoliberal Turn and the Bollywood Wedding Culture Industry

In the last decade of the 20th century, coinciding with India's economic deregulation, the Hindu wedding became a core attraction in popular Indian cinema. Weddings in real life, in turn, became more elaborate organized by a wedding industry, which professionalized and commodifed work that was previously done by an informal economy or outside of it by members of the family. Evoking the Frankfurt School, this paper locates the big wedding as a product of the emerging Bollywood culture industry and its ideological redefinition of nationalism/citizenship as both acts of consumption and the re-enactment of patriarchal and caste-based identities. Challenging the explanatory power of the notion of hybridity and its rejection of “totalization” narratives, the paper asks for a reconsideration of the meta-narratives of class and gender, capital and patriarchy to understand the ways in which global capital is most intimately experienced and lived.

Economic development, business strategy, and corporate restructuring in India

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to review the reasons for the increased pace of restructuring of Indian industry in response to increasing market efficiencies and declining transactions costs in India.Design/methodology/approachThis paper uses theory of transactions cost economics as the theoretical framework for analyzing the changing structure of Indian industry.FindingsAs in many developing countries, the Indian business environment has reflected high‐transactions costs so that Indian companies found it more efficient to diversify and internalize many unrelated activities. Consequently, most large Indian businesses have traditionally been widely diversified with vertically integrated group structures. As economic deregulation and adoption of internet technology reinforce each other, Indian transactions costs are declining and vertical integrated and diversified group structure is likely to become inefficient and a disadvantage.Practical implicationsDeclining transactions costs will continue to force significant and sudden restructuring and specialization among the large and major Indian conglomerates with rising volumes of mergers and acquisitions activity in India. This will require managers with new skill sets that include strategic analysis and undertaking successful corporate re‐structuring.Originality/valueThe paper presents an assessment of the impact on Indian business of new technologies and economic deregulation in India.

World Economic Crisis and Scenarios of Post-crisis Development: Marxist Analysis

Implications of the modern Marxist theory create the opportunity to show the inevitability, the reasons and the main features of the first world crisis of the XXI century. It has been generated by deregulation of economy, which caused the ‘classical’ crisis of overproduction, and by the new contradictions of late capitalism, in particular, by persistent over-accumulation of capital and by the excessive development of the transactional sector, of the fictitious financial capital and its isolation from the real sector. Marxist analysis of social interests and contradictions shows that anti-crisis measures require not only increasing of state regulation, but also determining on behalf of whom and in the interests of what social groups this regulation will be realized. The authors propose to do this on behalf of the financial capital and in the interests of citizens, but also formulate the neoconservative scenario of post-crisis development.

The Influence of Railway Freight Transport on Logistics Costs

The majority of the costs involved in logistics come from freight transport expenses, which are affected by various factors in today's world of economic deregulation. This study seeks to investigate the effectiveness of railway freight as a way of controlling logistics costs under the current conditions faced by major shippers. Models to express the compositive mechanism of truckload freight rates (i.e., transport expenses per ton-kilometer) based on a mileage system are introduced to enable case analysis. The suitability of each model and the availability and explanatory power of each constituent factor are then discussed in details. Finally, the degree of influence on the logistics expenses incurred by shippers using railway freight transport is derived.

Democratization in Central Europe

Democratization in Central Europe is a success story in historical perspective. Twenty years after the spectacular collapse of communism, most countries, which had belonged to the ”buffer zone” between West Germany and the Soviet Union, now belong to the European Union. The transition was relatively short and was characterized by negotiations, self-limiting behavior, and nonviolence of the participants (with the exception of the Romanian revolution). The ideas of 1989 included negative freedom, free market liberalism, consensual democracy, civil society, and the wish to return to Europe, determined by the social, political, and economic legacies of communism. The short transition was followed by a longer and more difficult consolidation, which was parallel with economic restructuring, privatization, and deregulation. The pain of economic transformation was socially accepted as an ”inevitable” part of the process. Social peace could therefore be based on the patience of these societies as well as on the hope to enter NATO and the European Union. In a way, it was an externally driven consolidation. In 2004, most of the Central European countries joined the European Union, which caused a landslide political change in their internal politics. While countries of Central Europe are now inside the EU, which caused some parallel changes in the leadership, the end of post-communism did not seem to bring fundamentally more innovative political elites into the leadership of these societies.

Stability of money demand function revisited in China

As China's economic reforms have undergone significant structural changes after 1979, it has been rather difficult to formulate a stable money demand function over the period following that year. While previous literature on the long-run relationship of money demand in China shows the existence of stable money demand, this article revisits the stability of the China money demand function over the period after 1979. To employ the unit root tests and the cointegration tests with structural break, the empirical evidence demonstrates that economic and financial deregulation did affect the stability of demand for money in China over the period 1977 to 2002. Moreover, the estimated long-run income and interest elasticity are respectively 1.01 (1.11) and −0.14 (−0.08) using the real M1 (M2) equation. In addition, real income and the interest rate are found to be weakly exogenous. We overall do find structural breakpoints mainly in 1980 and 1993, and they look to match clearly with corresponding critical financial and economic incidents.

UNIFEM, CEDAW and the Human Rights‐based Approach

textabstractGlobal governance in an era of human rights is beset by a number of unavoidable paradoxes. One is that as more states are increasingly held accountable for fulfilling legal obligations towards citizens, the same states are also obliged to collude in economic and financial deregulation processes that undermine and challenge both state sovereignty and the state’s ability to protect the vulnerable among their own populations. In this wider context, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) obliges governments to promote, protect and fulfil the equal rights of men and women in their own jurisdictions. In what amounts to the promotion of global governance for gender justice, the United Nations Development Fund forWomen (UNIFEM) plays a leading role within the UN system in making sure gender policies are co-ordinated and mainstreamed, and CEDAW is adhered to. Lee Waldorf is the lead editor of this report, as well as some other significant UNIFEM publications. This report will be referred to hereafter as UNIFEM-CEDAW (2007). It will be considered in the context of the recently published UNIFEM Strategic Plan for 2008–2011 (UNIFEM-Plan, 2007). ...

A Critical Assessment of Electricity and Natural Gas Deregulation

Economic deregulation of electric and gas utilities has failed to achieve its proposed objectives of lowering price, promoting greater consumer choice, constraining market power, and improving infrastructure performance. Concentration has grown, deregulated price increases exceed prices where regulation was maintained, and supposedly free markets do not assure control of market power or cost effectiveness in achieving environmental protection. An agenda for re-regulation is proposed. These reforms would continue the work of Institutional economists in the field of public utility economics.

Relocating Gentrification: The Working Class, Science and the State in Recent Urban Research

AbstractThis article amplifies Tom Slater's diagnosis of the causes of the gentrification of recent gentrification research. It argues that the shift from the denunciation to the celebration of gentrification, the elision of the displacement of the established residents, and the euphemistic focus on ‘social mixing’ partake of a broader pattern of invisibility of the working class in the public sphere and social inquiry. This effacing of the proletariat in the city is reinforced by the growing heteronomy of urban research, as the latter becomes more tightly tethered to the concerns of city rulers. Both tendencies, in turn, reveal and abet the shifting role of the state from provider of social support for lower‐income populations to supplier of business services and amenities for middle‐ and upper‐class urbanites — among them the cleansing of the built environment and the streets from the physical and human detritus wrought by economic deregulation and welfare retrenchment. To build better models of the changing nexus of class and space in the neoliberal city, we need to relocate gentrification in a broader and sturdier analytic framework by revising class analysis to capture the (de)formation of the postindustrial proletariat, resisting the seductions of the prefabricated problematics of policy, and giving pride of place to the state as producer of sociospatial inequality.Résumé Cet article amplifie le diagnostic de Tom Slater sur les causes de la ‘gentrification’ des études récentes sur la ‘gentrification’ urbaine. Le glissement de la dénonciation à l'éloge de la gentrification, l'élision du déplacement forcé des habitants établis et la focalisation euphémistique sur la ‘mixité sociale’ s'inscrivent dans un schéma plus large d'invisibilisation de la classe ouvrière dans la sphère publique et les investigations sociologiques. Cet effacement du prolétariat des métropoles est renforcé par l'hétéronomie croissante de la recherche urbaine, plus étroitement liée que jamais aux préoccupations des dirigeants de la ville. Ces deux tendances révèlent et facilitent la mutation du rôle de l'État, de fournisseur de soutiens sociaux aux populations démunies en agence de services et d'équipements marchands pour citadins des classes moyennes et supérieures — au premier rang desquels figure le nettoyage de l'environnement bâti et des rues des détritus humains et matériels engendrés par la dérégulation de l'économie et le recul de la protection sociale. Pour construire de meilleurs modèles des rapports changeants entre classe et espace dans la ville néolibérale, il faut replacer la gentrification des quartiers populaires dans un cadre analytique élargi et renforcé en réélaborant l'analyse de classe pour saisir la (dé)formation du prolétariat post‐industriel, en résistant aux séductions des problématiques préfabriquées de politique publique, et en accordant une place centrale à l'État en tant que producteur d'inégalités sociospatiales.

Procedural democracy, participatory democracy and regional networking: the multi‐terrain struggle for democracy in Southeast Asia

Southeast Asia experienced rapid economic growth during the 1980s and early 1990s largely because of the emergence of the developmental state, which successfully adapted itself to the thrust of neo‐liberal globalization by adopting economic liberalization, deregulation and privatization policies. However, the role of the developmental state was attacked and rolled back in the wake of the 1997–1998 regional financial crisis. Meanwhile, as a result of growth prior to the financial meltdown, a considerable political ferment occurred due to the consolidation of the middle‐classes. Consequently, in spite of state curbs and controls, democratic politics had (re)emerged prior to, as well as following, the 1997–1998 crisis. This article traces the rise and evolution of the NGOs and consolidation of civil society in four Southeast Asian countries, namely, the Philippines, Thailand, Indonesia and Malaysia. Central to the discussion is the extent to which the civil society organizations promoted a deepening of democracy and more equitable development. The analysis distinguishes between procedural democracy, perhaps best characterized by electoralism, and participatory democracy, which stresses that the everyday rights, interests, perspectives and involvement of civil society at large must be taken into consideration by the powers‐that‐be, in between elections. Although much progress has occurred in the realm of procedural democracy, that democratization is not meaningful if it is not accompanied by participatory democracy. A final section investigates how NGOs in Southeast Asia and beyond have been networking with one another transnationally, in order to further that democratization. Put simply, the struggle for democratization especially in this era of globalism, also characterized by US unilateralism and Bush’s war against terrorism, must be multi‐terrain and regional in scope.

Low-Cost Airports for Low-Cost Airlines: Flexible Design to Manage the Risks

Airport planning is shifting from the traditional pattern – driven by long-term point forecasts, high standards, and established clients – to that of recognizing great forecast uncertainty, many standards and changeable clients. This is a consequence of economic deregulation of aviation and the rise of low-cost airlines. Low-cost airlines are becoming significant factors in airport planning. Their requirements differ from those of ‘legacy’ carriers. They drive the development of secondary airports and cheaper airport terminals. They catalyze ‘low-cost airports’ around the ‘legacy main airports’ built for the ‘legacy airlines’. This paper proposes a flexible design strategy to deal with the uncertainty of this dynamic. This differs significantly from traditional airport master planning. It builds flexibility into the design, to enable airports to adjust to changes in the type, needs and location of traffic. The case of Portugal illustrates the current risks, and indicates how flexible design could manage uncertainties and maximize expected value.

Industrial Deregulation, Skill Upgrading, and Wage Inequality in India

We investigate the relationship between economic deregulation (delicensing), skill upgrading, and wage inequality during the 1980s and 1990s in India. We use a unique dataset on India's industrial licensing regime to test whether industrial deregulation during the 1980s and 1990s played a role in generating demand for skilled workers, as measured by the employment and wagebill shares of white-collar workers, and in raising the returns to skilled labor, as measured by the skill premium. Our analysis focuses not only on the difference between licensed and delicensed industries but also on the comparison of these differences during the 1980s, when India's external sector remained relatively closed to the world economy, and the 1990s, when India underwent massive liberalization reforms and became increasingly integrated with the global economy. We identify two main channels through which industrial delicensing affects the demand for skills and wage inequality: capital- and output-skill complementarities. Our analysis finds two important results. First, capital- and output-skill complementarities existed for firms in both licensed and delicensed industries but were stronger in delicensed industries both before and after 1991. The exception is output-skill complementarities with respect to the skill premium, where delicensed industries experienced lower output-skill complementarities compared to licensed ones both before and after 1991. Second, the contribution of industrial delicensing to both types of complementarities was considerably higher during the 1980s and much smaller after 1991. These results suggest that industrial delicensing benefited skilled labor via capital- and output-skill complementarities during the 1980s, the decade before India liberalized it's trade and investment regime. Thus, much of the increase in the demand for and returns to skill as a result of capital- and output-skill complementarities can be attributed to domestic reforms during the pre-1991 period in India.

"Are we nearly there yet?" Lessons for integrated sustainability assessment from EU environmental policy-making

Increased interest in sustainable development, and in policy assessment as a means to achieve that, have yielded little evidence of sustainable development principles in policy assessment. This paper presents a study at a more strategic level of policy-making: the European Union (EU)'s environmental Thematic Strategies (TSs). Elements of Integrated Sustainability Assessment (ISA), such as consultation, were often strong, and quantitative analysis was integrated into policy development. But the primary aim of EU policy of pursuing economic growth and de regulation limits the scope and effectiveness of sustainability assessment. This paper concludes by drawing on literature on evidence in policy-making to suggest lessons for ISA.

Disaggregating Freight Analysis Framework Version 2 Data for Florida

Economic expansion and global trade over the past several decades have driven growth in demand for freight transportation in the United States. However, freight transportation capacity is expanding too slowly to keep up with demand, and freight productivity improvements gained through investment in the Interstate highway system and economic deregulation of the freight transportation industry in the 1980s are showing diminishing returns. In Florida, this problem is especially acute, because the population and employment in the state between 2001 and 2030 are expected to grow dramatically. For Florida to maintain its competitiveness in the face of this growth, a good understanding of freight and its impacts on the transportation network is needed. The Freight Analysis Framework Version 2.2 (FAF2) provides a wealth of information to understand and evaluate the impact of freight on the transportation network. To make FAF2 more applicable to state departments of transportation and metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs), it is necessary to disaggregate the FAF2 regional origin–destination (O-D) database to smaller geographies. Two potential audiences will find a disaggregated FAF2 O-D database useful. The first audience consists of MPO and state department of transportation modelers who want equations for inclusion in travel demand models that would estimate freight, and ultimately truck shipments, on the basis of population and employment. The second audience consists of planners who want the FAF2 tonnage information by detailed commodities at the county level of geography. The existence of the two groups suggests different methods. A methodology that satisfies both audiences was developed.

Integration strategies and barriers to co‐operation in cross‐border regions: Case study of the Øresund region

The purpose of the article is to analyze strategies for cross‐border integration in the Øresund Region. The point of departure is that the development of strategies for cross‐border integration is dependent on the development on both the general level in the EU and deregulation of economy and business on the global level. In this respect, the article points out the importance of market forces and their influence on institutional change. Recent economic crises have put growth center stage at both the national and regional level, and have called for regional development programs on both the Swedish and Danish sides of the Sound. The strengths and weaknesses of the Øresund Region's ‘traditional’ and new institutions as instruments for change are examined. The article identifies and discusses the structures, institutions, and players which are the driving forces in the field between markets and institutions.