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The concept of light-handed regulation, including light-handed approaches to the regulation of airport services, is discussed. The rationale for the economic regulation of airport services and the traditional approaches used for economic regulation of airport charges are summarized. The evolution of international practice of light-handed regulation is outlined, including the experience with minimal regulation across monopoly industries in New Zealand and the acceptance of “negotiated settlements” in utility industries in North America. General reasons for moving to light-handed regulation of airports include the disadvantages of the price cap approach in practice and the benefits of facilitating greater negotiation between airports and users. Comparisons are made between alternative approaches to light-handed regulation of airport services, including price and quality of service monitoring, information disclosure regulation and negotiate-arbitrate regulation, approaches that have been applied to airport services in Australia and New Zealand. The role and nature of the incentives under each approach are discussed. The chapter concludes that whether light-handed regulation provides a suitable alternative approach to direct regulation depends on the market circumstances and the design characteristics of the light-handed approach.

The Bureau of Economics in the Federal Trade Commission has a three-part role in the Agency and the strength of its functions changed over time depending on the preferences and ideology of the FTC’s leaders, developments in the field of economics, and the tenor of the times. The over-riding current role is to provide well considered, unbiased economic advice regarding antitrust and consumer protection law enforcement cases to the legal staff and the Commission. The second role, which long ago was primary, is to provide reports on investigations of various industries to the public and public officials. This role was more recently called research or “policy R&D”. A third role is to advocate for competition and markets both domestically and internationally. As a practical matter, the provision of economic advice to the FTC and to the legal staff has required that the economists wear “two hats,” helping the legal staff investigate cases and provide evidence to support law enforcement cases while also providing advice to the legal bureaus and to the Commission on which cases to pursue (thus providing “a second set of eyes” to evaluate cases). There is sometimes a tension in those functions because building a case is not the same as evaluating a case. Economists and the Bureau of Economics have provided such services to the FTC for over 100 years proving that a sub-organization can survive while playing roles that sometimes conflict. Such a life is not, however, always easy or fun.

While airports traditionally have been seen as classic examples of public enterprises, the government’s role in airport management has been changing throughout the world. This study explores airport governance models with a focus on stakeholder issues. Relatively little is known empirically about how public, private, or public–private partnership (PPP) provision of airport services affects different stakeholders. The main aim of this study is to develop a better understanding of the impact of airport governance forms on stakeholders. For this purpose, a theoretical background focused on identifying airport stakeholders and their conflicting interests is followed by a qualitative content analysis using past studies on airport management. The results suggest that a balanced approach is required to deal with stakeholder interests detached from their governance structures.

Airport economics literature has recently included the supply of concession services among the factors that might affect airport pricing. In particular, there is only little empirical analysis on whether: (i) the supply of airport concession services can stimulate the demand for travel (two-side complementarity) and (ii) the demand for airport concession services is independent of traveling activities (welfare neutrality). In this chapter, we survey papers that have addressed two-side complementarity and welfare neutrality in airport concessions. Our goal is to discuss the different assumptions that have shaped the models and to collect evidences, facts and empirical findings that may support analytical hypotheses. We argue that the notions of two-side complementarity and welfare neutrality might be interrelated – especially when airports invest in concessions in the area accessible to non-passengers. Welfare gains should be assessed on a case by case basis, depending on the type of airport in terms of ownership, size (and the relative mass of connecting passengers compared to origin–destination passengers), and the source of concession revenues. Our arguments might be particularly relevant to policy makers who need to understand (i) whether the supply of concessions reduces or increases the benefits of airport (aviation) price regulation and (ii) whether the effective control of market power may require the regulation of the prices of both the businesses.

With the liberalization of air transport and the enlargement of air traffic, airports face insistent requests from airlines to perform and improve both service quality and cost efficiency. As a result, airport ownership, governance, and regulations are debated and sometimes have already been changed. Airport pricing under different governance structure is a central issue in this context.

The Norwegian health care system is semi-decentralized. Primary care and long-term care (LTC) are the responsibilities of the municipalities. Specialist care is the responsibility of the central government and is organised through four Regional Health Authorities (RHA). Resource use, health outcomes and severity are the three main pillars for priority setting, regularly applied in reimbursement decisions for pharmaceuticals.

The sustainability of health care is challenged in Norway. The main factors are a growing elderly population with high need of complex, coordinated services, an increasing demand for newly approved drugs and advanced technology and a potential shortage of health care personnel.

We present recent trials and policy reforms in Norway aimed at improving care pathways combined with cost containment. Reforms in the pharmaceutical market, both with regard to market access and reimbursement (cost-effectiveness), and regulation of prices, have resulted in cost containment. The primary care sector awaits reform initiatives to recruit and retain physicians as general practitioners. No reform in the hospital sector has had cost containment as a main focus. The sector is characterized with low productivity growth, and expenditures that have increased more than the GDP growth. Waiting times are long, and coordination between sub-sectors of health care has been poor, although the Coordination reform of 2012 has alleviated some of the challenges related to intersectoral coordination. Still, the divided responsibility for health care between the central government and the municipalities creates tensions between national ambitions and local decisions in the financing and provision of health services.

The purpose of this chapter is to investigate the question of whether corporate social responsibility (CSR) can be used as a link of trust between business and society, and which role CSR plays in recovering distrust in businesses. It uses a mixed methods study of processes of moving businesses within the Danish water sector from a general trust-breakdown to trust recovery from 2003 to 2013.

Trust recovery is found to depend on stakeholders’ mutual engagement with each other and their willingness to share knowledge and learn from each other’s professional and institutional cultures and languages. An alignment of vocabularies of motives between regulation and voluntary CSR is found to be useful for building trust between conflicting parties. Furthermore the findings shows that the more stakeholders’ languages, motives and logics can coexist, the more trust can be recovered.

The research is limited by a study of one business sector in one country and the findings have implications greater than the local contexts of which it is researched, because it is usable in other sectors that suffer from severe trust-breakdowns such as government systems in both the public and private sectors.

This chapter suggests a theoretical extension of Bogenschneider and Corbett’s (2010) Community Dissonance Theory to embrace multiple stakeholders each having their own complex and unique culture and communication modus based on their institutional, professional or individual comprehensive language universes. This includes knowledge-sharing and educative diffusion of the stakeholders’ language universes’ vocabularies including its important nouns, verbs, terminologies, semantics, taxonomies and axioms as well as the stakeholders’ motives and logics implemented into these universes.

This research estimates a multi-product flexible cost function of airport variable costs. Data for the analysis are a panel of 50 airports from 1996 to 2008. Output includes domestic and international departures, non-aeronautical operating revenues, and the number of transport workload units, where a workload unit is a passenger or the equivalent of a 220 pound packet of cargo. The quasi-fixed factor is the equivalent number of 10,000′ × 150′ runways at an airport. After correcting for first-order serial correlation, the analysis finds that airports operate under constant returns to runway utilization and multi-product decreasing returns to scale, production technology is consistent with product specific returns to capacity utilization and anti-complementarity across outputs, and general airport operations have input substitution possibilities with personnel and contractual repair/maintenance inputs. The study also finds 1.05% technology progress over the sample period, due to strong growth prior to 2001, with similar productivity growth rates for large and medium hubs.