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The paper discusses the balance between values and economic efficiency in the public sector in comparison with the private sector. The argument is that the public sector, hence the public welfare service institutions, can learn much from the private service sector, hence the private service firms with regard to the relation to values, ethics, corporate social responsibility (CSR) and efficiency in order to improve the balance between values and efficiency in the public sector.

The paper discusses the concept of balance in relation to the development of the management of private service companies as a useful alternative to new public management (NPM). It discusses this with regard to three issues: the evolution of the management of private companies; what can the public sector, hence the public welfare institutions, learn from the evolution of management of private companies? How would it be possible for governments to work for an alternative to NPM, on the basis of the experiences of management of private companies, improving the balance between values and economic efficiency in the public sector?

It is argued that a deadlock in the development of efficiency management in the public sector, hence in the public welfare service institutions, is created. It is argued, furthermore, that this deadlock to a great extent, paradoxically, is created because of the focusing on NPM for almost two decades as the most important tool to develop efficiency management in the public sector. Finally, it is argued that the experiences in private companies regarding how to find a proper balance between values, ethics, CSR and economic efficiency can be very helpful in developing a strategy within the public sector to unlock the deadlock regarding the development of efficiency management. That is why the experiences of management of the private services companies can become a constructive alternative to the experiences of NPM in the public sector at the level of welfare institutions.

There would be potential for more research on CSR, business ethics and values‐driven management in relation to the public sector.

The paper offers new insight into the relation between values, CSR and management models in the private and in the public sector.

This is the first paper in a volume devoted exclusively to antitrust law and economics. It summarizes the other papers and addresses two issues. First, after showing that the federal courts generally view consumer welfare as the ultimate goal of antitrust law, it asks what they mean by that term. It concludes that recent decisions appear more likely to equate consumer welfare with the well-being of consumers in the relevant market than with economic efficiency. Second, it asks whether a buyer must possess monopsony power to induce a price discrimination that is not cost justified. It concludes that a buyer can often obtain an unjustified concession simply by wielding bargaining power, but the resulting concession may frequently – though not always – improve consumer welfare.

The study examines the relationship between the consequential social cost of market power (i.e. welfare performance of banks) and cost efficiency using data covering the period 2009 to 2017 from the Ghanaian banking industry.

The study adopts the ordinary least squares (OLS), fixed effect (FE) panel regression and the quantile regression (QR) approaches to control for heterogeneity and provide increased room for policy relevance. The two-stage least squares instrumental variables (2SLS-IV) regression is used to ensure the robustness of the findings against the problem of possible reverse causality.

The results indicate a positive relationship between banks' welfare performance and cost efficiency, which suggests that greater cost efficiency hedges welfare losses. In other words, welfare gains and cost-efficient banks are not mutually exclusive. Also, the results show evidence that the sensitivity of welfare gain to cost efficiency depends on the knowledge of local market dynamics. Further, the findings from the QR estimation suggest that, but for welfare loss at low (Q.25) to the median (Q.50) quantiles, cost efficiency is a necessary and sufficient condition to hedge the welfare losses.

The results demonstrate that financial consumer protection cannot be achieved without cost efficiency in the presence of both foreign banks and high market knowledge. Therefore, our paper suggests an integrated cost efficiency policy approach that has the complementary effect of a robust information sharing mechanism and incentives to hedge against welfare losses in the banking sector of emerging economies. Moreover, if welfare gain is synonymous with cost-efficient banks, then the presence of a quiet life is typical of financial consumer protection.

This study provides insight into the importance of cost efficiency to the public policy of financial consumer protection in an era of foreign banks' dominance. From the review of prior literature, this paper is the first to apply the QR estimation technique to examine the effect of cost efficiency throughout the conditional distribution of bank welfare performance rather than just the conditional mean effect of cost efficiency.

Efficiency, equity, equality and parity all have shortcomings in both procedural and substantive values. The primary readjustment required is to re‐stress political analysis, even though it may deal with fluid concepts such as power and values. Secondly, there is a need to reverse the apparent tendency among policy analysts to reduce real political and social conflicts to the level of technological problems which only need more resources or technological innovations in order to be “solved”. The fluidity of values such as equity, equality and parity means that they are malleable and can be changed over time via education; social policies can thus be re‐shaped.

Behavioral economics poses a challenge for the welfare evaluation of choices, particularly those that involve risk. It demands that we recognize that the descriptive account of behavior toward those choices might not be the ones we were all taught, and still teach, and that subjective risk perceptions might not accord with expert assessments of probabilities. In addition to these challenges, we are faced with the need to jettison naive notions of revealed preferences, according to which every choice by a subject expresses her objective function, as behavioral evidence forces us to confront pervasive inconsistencies and noise in a typical individual’s choice data. A principled account of errant choice must be built into models used for identification and estimation. These challenges demand close attention to the methodological claims often used to justify policy interventions. They also require, we argue, closer attention by economists to relevant contributions from cognitive science. We propose that a quantitative application of the “intentional stance” of Dennett provides a coherent, attractive and general approach to behavioral welfare economics.

This paper aims to offer an analysis of the conflicting values behind Norway's much celebrated inclusive working life (IWL) programme, which aims to reduce sickness absenteeism, to increase the average age of retirement, and to hire functionally challenged persons. This article, moreover, presents sorely needed qualitative data from a preliminary study on IWL that shows how state‐owned enterprises have struggled to cope with the conflicting goals.

This is a qualitative study based on interviews with regional managers and representatives of the unions who had to adapt to IWL, and the results suggest possible explanations behind the disappointing numbers found by other quantitative studies on IWL.

Because of the decision to implement IWL, regional managers are caught in the middle of two different ideologies, namely, neo‐liberalism or new public management (NPM) and the welfare‐state ideology, and they find themselves making choices according to the former. This study on state enterprises at the local level has found that managers and union representatives appeared to support the intentions behind the programme, but they clearly prioritized productivity and efficiency over inclusiveness.

As the results are from a preliminary qualitative study of IWL that only included state enterprises, there is a need for further research that also includes the private enterprises.

This study finds that IWL is ineffective because it cannot harmonize the NPM and the welfare‐state ideologies.

This article helps to remedy the lack of qualitative documentation on the progress of IWL. These results also question the prevailing optimism over the potential of IWL by pointing to the ideological tensions between welfare and efficiency.

We examine a setting in which a vertically integrated provider (VIP) initially has a duty to deal with an independent rival at unregulated upstream and downstream prices. The duty to deal is subsequently terminated which enables the VIP to acquire the independent rival (or the expertise necessary to produce the rival's product) and then serve as a two-product monopolist in the downstream market. We find that the refusal to deal decreases rivalry but increases economic efficiency and is therefore presumptively “pro-competitive.” The paramount policy question concerns whether a refusal to deal that eliminates a rival and monopolizes the downstream market while increasing static efficiency should be considered a violation of Section 2 of the Sherman Act. This analysis also has implications for policies governing the unbundling of next-generation telecommunications networks.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the impact of privatization on the efficiency of five of the biggest Spanish state‐owned companies: Repsol, Iberia, Endesa, Telefónica and REE, which enjoy monopoly status in sectors like energy, telecommunications and air transport.

The paper applies the Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) and Tobit analysis to analyze efficiency changes and to determine the effect of the ownership and board structure on technical efficiency.

The results show that the improvements in efficiency are not related to the privatization. Thus the empirical research suggests that a change of ownership per se is not sufficient to bring about the effects forecast by privatization advocators.

More research regarding other issues such as organizational changes, strategic alliances and market regulation is needed, as they are factors that explain efficiency variations.

The study contributes to the literature on privatization because it adds new empirical evidence about Spain, questioning whether the privatization programs have helped to improve the efficiency of the companies.

Multinational corporations (MNCs) occupy a central role within the process of globalisation as evidenced through global foreign direct investment (FDI) inflows valued at US$3.1 trillion by the end of 2000. The importance of regulation is evident through the significant growth in global regulatory changes throughout the 1990s.The influence of regulation on UK firms' international investment decisions is assessed.

Econometric analysis measures the influence of regulation and political risk on 121 UK firms with international operations. Host countries are divided into developed and less developed regions based on the World Bank country classification. Data derive from questionnaires that cover the period 1994‐1996 and include information on host country features of two economically and culturally different countries in which firms have ongoing overseas operations.

The findings indicate that regulation is a statistically significant, and positive, factor influencing internationally mobile FDI. There are however, regional differences between less developed and developed economies. Proportionately smaller FDI inflows to less developed economies partially reflect MNCs' response to weak governance and the regional predisposition towards corrupt practices.

Hitherto international business has been able to avoid the regulatory reach as one of the perks of being an international player. The prospect for long‐term avoidance is of a more limited time‐frame as sovereign status does not exempt a country from international intervention. As countries adopt a united approach to regulation, avoidance becomes less of an issue and may be replaced by more critical evaluation of different types of regulation.