In December 1990, the twelve regional electricity companies responsible for the distribution and supply of electricity in England and Wales were privatised. For the first few years following privatisation, real prices, profits and costs in the industry rose. Following two price control reviews, prices have now fallen sharply and there have been substantial reductions in costs and, more recently, in profits. This paper attempts to conduct a social cost benefit analysis of the privatisation by examining actual and predicted falls in costs over the period to 2005. The authors conclude that the privatisation did yield net benefits but that these were unevenly distributed across time and groups in society. Relative to our preferred counterfactual, the gains to consumers are equivalent to 3% lower prices, and the government gains £5bn in sales proceeds and net taxes. However, consumers only begin to gain from 2000.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Find related papers by JEL classification: H43 - Public Economics - - Publicly Provided Goods - - - Project Evaluation; Social Discount Rate L94 - Industrial Organization - - Industry Studies: Transportation and Utilities - - - Electric Utilities
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
Cited by: (explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.)