Towards a typology of regulatory governance regimes in the liberalizing network industries

The purpose of this paper is to discuss various institutional arrangements in relation to different techno-economic conditions in network industries. We proceed along three steps: we first describe typical technological and economic configurations in the network industries that are related to essential technical functions. In a second step we summarize typical modes of organization that are applied in infrastructure reforms. The liberalization of infrastructures depends on the opportunities to configure these modes of organization for essential technical functions towards competition and private sector involvement. This approach allows us identifying different techno-economic configurations of infrastructures, and thus different institutional opportunities for liberalization that we describe as a third step. Depending on the political and economic systems, each of these institutional configurations can be addressed in different ways, allowing for different national styles of infrastructure reform.