Public utilities: Is the British experience a model for developing countries?

Developing countries considering privatizating their public utilities could learn from the British experience. Britain was one of the first countries to embark on a full scale nationalization programme and one of the first to embark on privatization of the major utilities such as telecommunications, gas, water, electricity, coal and rail. Privatization has raised fundamental questions about the effective regulation of Company Act companies, a term used to describe the legal status of the companies newly-formed under privatization. Regulation is a crucial part of the structures put in place after privatization, underlined by the fact that many of the utilities in the United Kingdom remain virtual monopolies. Regulation through a variety of semi-independent agencies is primarily intended to protect the interests of consumers but is, increasingly, required to provide supervision of competition in the utility industries 1 . These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.