Mark W. Frankena - Böcker

Competition in the generation, transmission, and distribution of electricity is of increasing interest to policy makers as well as to buyers and sellers of power. The use of competition as a social policy tool to benefit consumers carries the necessity of preserving competition when it is threatened by mergers or other structural changes. The work explains central principles of antitrust economics and applies them to mergers in the electric power industry. This work focuses on mergers, but the economic principles explained here will be useful in analyzing many important issues flowing from growth of competition in electric power. For example, proper definition of markets and analysis of market power will be useful in decisions on whether to continue regulation.

This book describes and analyses the provincial government's role in municipal and regional planning. The conversion of farmland to urban and other uses is discussed, as are the issues raised by the reports of the Ontario Planning Act Review Committee and the Federal/Provincial Task Force on the Supply and Price of Serviced Residential Land and the province's Green Paper on Planning for Agriculture.The authors criticize the government's failure to conduct cost-benefit studies before setting up planning programs and show that there is little factual basis for recent alarm over the disappearance of farmland. Data gathered here for the first time show that the conversion of agricultural land to built-up urban use and non-farm rural residential use in Ontario has been taking place quite slowly in view of the rate of productivity increase in agriculture, the stock of agricultural land, and the decline in the acreage of census farms.Economists will find in this book a useful survey of recent trends and policies. Planners, policy-makers, and students will welcome this detailed case study of how economic analysis ought to be used in formulating land use policies.