Strathclyde Academic Media Demystifying Economic Regulation: A Practitioner's Guide

The regulation of network industries, economic regulation and regulating digital platforms collectively impact and shape the economies of countries, as well as affecting all of their consumers and citizens. Regulation is therefore incredibly important to every sector. The costs of poor regulation to a country are just humongous. This book is founded on the belief that market failures in many sectors of [developing] economies, including in energy, telecoms, water, transportation, health, aviation, education, banking, etc. are due - in large part - to the failure of regulation. However, the truth is that good regulation is complex, nuanced, idiosyncratic to the local country context, and not one-size-fit-all across countries. These call for more education and awareness of the true importance of regulation, as well as demystifying it as much as possible. These are the dual challenges of this book. Many textbooks/books on regulation and/or peer reviewed articles are written by expert economists, lawyers, social science or political science experts. Not this book - which is authored by a trained scientist and engineer. For this reason, the perspective on demystifying regulation is unique and different - disassembling it as much as possible, and putting it back together in order to construct more explicable and repeatable 'art and science' to regulation.