Reviews economic impact of Federal regulations on the petroleum industry. Focuses on crude oil supplies, domestic competition, restrictions on less expensive foreign crude oil imports, the need to maintain higher domestic prices as development incentive and regional allocation inequities, especially in the Northeast.

As Chairman of the Civil Aeronautics Board in the late 1970s, Alfred E. Kahn presided over the deregulation of the airlines and his book, published earlier in that decade, presented the first comprehensive integration of the economic theory and institutional practice of economic regulation. In his lengthy new introduction to this edition Kahn surveys and analyzes the deregulation revolution that has not only swept the airlines but has transformed American public utilities and private industries generally over the past seventeen years. While attitudes toward regulation have changed several times in the intervening years and government regulation has waxed and waned, the question of whether to regulate more or to regulate less is a topic of constant debate, one that The Economics of Regulation addresses incisively. It clearly remains the standard work in the field, a starting point and reference tool for anyone working in regulation.Kahn points out that while dramatic changes have come about in the structurally competitive industries - the airlines, trucking, stock exchange brokerage services, railroads, buses, cable television, oil and natural gas - the consensus about the desirability and necessity for regulated monopoly in public utilities has likewise been dissolving, under the burdens of inflation, fuel crises, and the traumatic experience with nuclear plants. Kahn reviews and assesses the changes in both areas: he is particularly frank in his appraisal of the effect of deregulation on the airlines. His conclusion today mirrors that of his original, seminal work - that different industries need different mixes of institutional arrangements that cannot be decided on the basis of ideology.

The first systematic investigation of changes in oil market governance in the advanced industrial democracies over the last three decades.

Originally published in 1975, Energy provides a comprehensive bibliography of energy in the context of the social sciences. The book argues that energy problems are best seen in the context of social phenomena, such as social attitudes, social behaviours, social institutions and structures and populations. The authors argue that to examine energy problems outside of the context of social factors is to lack a full and detailed examination of the subject. The bibliography provides a comprehensive collection of sources from a range of areas in the social sciences on the subject of energy.