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Transcript For Video Lecture 4.1
Transcript For Video Lecture 4.1
Transcript For Video Lecture 4.1
of the Video Lecture 4.1: Monopoly Regulation with Tomas Gomez
Hello, I am Tomas Gomez and I am going to make an introduction to monopoly regulation. As
many of you know electric power systems have been regulated for many years as natural
monopolies. In the 90s there was a process of liberalisation all over the world and there were
many industries until then considered as natural monopolies such as air transport,
telecommunications, electricity and gas supply, which were deregulated and privatised. Today we
have electricity markets all over the world; we have markets in Europe, in the States in some
countries in Latin America, in Australia and other places. In this presentation we are going to
introduce what the economic rationale behind monopolies is, why monopolies need regulatory
intervention and which are the typical forms of monopoly regulation.
Monopolies exhibit economies of scale. What means ”economies of scale”? It means that the
average production cost reviews with the amount of production that you have. For instance, to
transmit power using or building a single line for transmitting 500 megawatts is much cheaper
than building 2 lines for transmitting 250 each. In the economies of scale markets don’t work. It
means that the large companies can produce cheaper than the rest of the competitors, in the end
throwing them out of the market. In this case when the company becomes the single provider it
will increase the prices and get more profits. This situation cannot be allowed and for this reason
we need regulatory intervention. The regulator is the one that is going to set the final tariffs or is
going to set the remuneration of the monopolistic activities. Remember that this is very different
from what happens in markets. In markets prices are the result of the interaction between supply
and demand.
Setting prices or setting remuneration of monopolistic activities is a tradeoff between economic
efficiency and viability of the monopoly company. The prices cannot be very high because
industries will lose competitiveness and also the consumers will have the welfare social lost. On
the other hand the prices cannot be very low because the regulated company is not going to be
viable anymore. Regulators usually differentiate several different costs, which are mainly
operational costs we call OPEX. OPEX are related with annual expenses, labour and other
consumables for operation and maintenance of installations. We have also capital costs, CAPEX
which are related with investments and are related to the depreciation of the rate of return on
that investment. And finally other types of costs, for instance taxes or fixed costs that depend on
the kind of activity that the monopoly is doing.
How has restructuring changed monopoly regulation? Before restructuring the typical
organization was vertically integrated utilities regulated under what we call the traditional form of
regulation, which means cost of service or rates of return regulation. Under this form of regulation
regulators set annual tariffs, and the tariff in that way allow the company to earn a specific rate of
return. On the other hand after restructuring the industry was unbundled and we have already
transmission and distribution companies that are regulated under a new form of regulation that
we call incentive based regulation. This regulation was introduced in the UK in the 90s and the
main idea of this regulation is to set, for longer periods of time, for 4 or 5 years, the trajectory for
revenues or the trajectory for the tariffs below the inflation rate, below a productivity factor we
call X. This is the reason this regulation is known also as RPIX. RPI stands for Retail Price Index. In
the end this will hopefully produce a winwin situation under which consumers will enjoy prices
below inflation and companies will be allowed to return the profits, if they are efficient, below
what were anticipated as efficient costs.
What is next in the module? Well as a former regulator I can tell you that monopoly regulation is
not an easy task, it is a complex and challenging task. And as usual, as it happens in other things
the devil is in the details. We will see in the rest of the videos how the implementation details of
cost of service regulation or also implementation details for incentive regulation. That also will be
added to some regulatory tools that regulators use according to their different expertise and in
this case we have accounting and auditing systems, we have benchmarking and econometric and
engineering tools.
Thank you very much.