KEY MESSAGES

Beyond looking at the roles and functions of economic regulators in detail, the report examines how economic regulators are involved in the infrastructure lifecycle, the infrastructure needs of the industries they regulate, how they use data to support the delivery of their mandate, the extent to which their roles and functions have changed, the involvement of economic regulators in the policy process, and the challenges that economic regulators are currently facing in delivering their mandate

Overall, the report finds that most economic regulators are, in fact, not directly involved in the discrete decision making that occurs in each stage of the infrastructure lifecycle — this is left to the infrastructure operator to manage. Instead, they seek to influence the behaviour of the operator as it manages the infrastructure through the lifecycle. For example, to prevent the exercise of market power, economic regulators constrain tariffs to efficient levels. While this limits the operator’s budget for managing the infrastructure, it does not restrict the way the operator manages the infrastructure within this budget. Economic regulators also provide financial incentives to operators in pursuit of objectives such as improving service quality.

OECD Forum on Governance of Infrastructure

• Productivity, jobs, wellbeing: making infrastructure deliver - Paris, France, 20 March 2017

related publications

• Getting Infrastructure Right - A framework for better governance