Advanced Textbooks in Economics, Volume 23: Public Enterprise Economics: Theory and Application focuses on economics, mathematical economics, and econometrics, including microeconomics, marginal-cost pricing, taxes, and income effects. The manuscript takes a look at the essential parts of public sector pricing models, normative optimum theory, and normative piecemeal theory. Discussions focus on welfare improvements with non-tight constraints, welfare -improving increases of public inefficiency, conditions for optimal prices and quantities, compensating for income effects, and conditions for optimal quality. The book then ponders on marginal-cost pricing, Ramsey pricing, rate of return regulation, and pricing with distributional aims. Topics include comparing distributional and allocative pricing, prices versus taxes, optimum Ramsey policy, influence of Ramsey prices on allocation, distribution, and stabilization, and consequences for allocation, distribution, and stabilization. The publication examines bus and underground services in London, economic theory and empirical analysis, and different approaches towards optimal quality, including empirical studies on bus and underground demand, organizational and political history, and microeconomics of the representative consumer. The book is a valuable source of data for researchers interested in public enterprise economics.

This clear, precisely written text presents an important branch of the modern, micro-economically based theory of industrial organization and of public finance, utilizing calculus only. Answers are provided to some pertinent economic questions, such as the pricing policies of vote-seeking politicians, of empire-building bureaucrats and of out-put-maximizing and energy-saving public utilities. These policies are compared with the welfare economic benchmark rules e.g. on marginal cost pricing and Ramsey pricing. Great significance is attached to price regulation. The book elucidates the recent replacement of rate of return regulation by price-cap regulation. It also explains why many simple rules like yardstick regulation fail to achieve optimal prices, which shows how complicated it is to induce managers to truthfully reveal their private information. How this can be achieved properly is shown in various principal-agent models on regulation with uncertain costs, uncertain demand and with soft budget constraints.

Originally published in 1971, this is a rigorous analysis of the economic aspects of the efficiency of public enterprises at the time. The author first restates and extends the relevant parts of welfare economics, and then illustrates its application to particular cases, drawing on the work of the National Board for Prices and Incomes, of which he was Deputy Chairman. The analysis is developed stage by stage, with the emphasis on applicability and ease of comprehension, rather than on generality or mathematical elegance. Financial performance, the second-best, the optimal degree of complexity of price structures and problems of optimal quality are first discussed in a static framework. Time is next introduced, leading to a marginal cost concept derived from a multi-period optimizing model. The analysis is then related to urban transport, shipping, gas and coal. This is likely to become a standard work of more general scope than the authors earlier book on electricity supply. It rests, however, on a similar combination of economic theory and high-level experience of the real problems of public enterprises.

This book presents the key interactions in local government and public enterprise, drawing together the challenges for local governance in the practice of public entrepreneurship and its response to collaboration, place and place making. Specifically, this book includes the impact of local partnerships and public entrepreneurs in local policy implementation. It is written by established authors bringing together their experience and practice of local partnerships and public entrepreneurship in place-based strategies, and will be of value to local government, new forms of enterprise partnerships, wider agencies and public entrepreneurship scholars as well as policymakers responsible for implementation of place-based regeneration. This text will be of key interest to students, scholars and practitioners in public administration, business administration, local government, entrepreneurship, public sector management and more broadly to those with interests in public policy, business and management, political science, economics, urban studies and geography.