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Liberalization and Regulatory Reform of Public Utilities in Italy: A Cross-Sectoral Analysis

This study aims to contribute investigating the difficulties to reap the intended benefits of policy reforms to liberalize and re-regulate network industries. This issue is tackled through the 'theoretical lenses' of new institutional economics, in particular by following the Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) framework. The study is a comparative analysis of the effects of liberalization and regulatory reforms of network industries within the same country context. In Italy, various reforms of network industries have been made and implemented during the 1990s and 2000s, especially in water, gas, electricity, telecommunications, railways, highways, local public transports, and urban solid waste. These reforms resulted in changes of regulatory institutions and industry structures, but they generally led to modest changes in competitive pressures and industry performance. This analysis suggests that the difficulty to implement liberalization and regulatory reforms of network industries in Italy may be explained by various concurrent mechanisms, which relate to the rent-seeking behavior of the actors of the industry's community, the rise of barriers to entry against competitors, and the adoption of collusive practices between regulators and regulated. This study suggests some tentative generalizations concerning the effectiveness of reforms intended to open up network industries to competitive pressures.