Privatisation, Restructuring and Regulation: Electricity Supply Industry in Thailand

After the 1997 financial crisis electricity supply industry (ESI) restructuring and privatisation of state owned enterprises (SOEs) in this industry were included in the Master Plan for State Enterprise Sector Reform. Considering the extent of debate over privatisation, restructuring and regulation of the ESI in Thailand in recent years there was a surprising lack of rigorous economic analyses and studies. This thesis aims to fill that gap. Part I of this thesis highlights the economic and political background material on: the SOE sector; reform and privatisation of SOEs; SOEs, restructuring and regulation in the ESI in Thailand. Then, in Part II, the theoretical and empirical literature on privatisation, natural monopoly and economic regulation along with regulation in practice, is drawn upon to create framework for analyses in Part III. In addition, characteristics of developing countries are discussed to explore an appropriate choice of regulatory regimes in Thailand. In Part III analyses of regulation and privatisation in ESI in Thailand are presented. Regulatory, efficiency and fiscal issues are examined. The major finding from the regulatory analysis is that, due to poor regulatory capacity, a specialised, separated and centralised form of regulatory body for ESI is recommended for Thailand. A high powered incentive regulatory regime, in the form of a revenue cap, is recommended for electricity transmission and distribution. In addition, this analysis demonstrates that the adoption of regulatory finance from developed countries with well developed capital and equity markets needs some modifications to fit with Thailand, which is characterised by poor accounting and auditing systems and weakly functioning capital and equity markets. The problem of lack of data and asymmetric information faced by the regulator in Thailand is more severe than in developed countries. Then this thesis examines the empirical analyses for the two widely claimed justifications for privatisation: efficiency improvement and fiscal benefit. In the efficiency analysis, measures of the technical efficiency of the electricity generation sector in Thailand are estimated by employing a comparative application of Data Envelopment Analysis and Stochastic Frontier Analysis approaches. Results show that the state owned, electricity generating company in Thailand is on the efficiency frontier, meaning that the expected efficiency improvement after it privatisation is unlikely to happen. Then a fiscal analysis is undertaken to evaluate fiscal net benefits of full privatisation in form of asset sales of all SOEs in ESI. This analysis employed a bottom-up valuation approach, taking issues in the public sector into account, to assess fiscal costs (retention of SOEs) and benefits (sale of SOEs) of privatisation. Full privatisation of Thai state owned, electricity generation company results in fiscal net benefits only when ESI restructuring and deregulation of wholesale electricity market are well established. Under revenue cap regulation, full privatisation of the regulated distribution monopolies is fiscally feasible only when they are privatised at very high sale price or privatised firms achieve very high annual costs reductions and operate much more efficiently than under public ownership. In summary, ESI restructuring and adoption of a regulatory regime, form and finance from developed countries has to be undertaken with care and modified in light of Thai characteristics and economy. ESI reform requires proper sequencing. Building up regulatory capacity and designing effective and practical regulatory regimes are required to achieve effective regulation in Thailand. ESI has to be restructured to introduce competition, and regulation has to be in place to ensure fair competition and to regulate natural monopoly activities before privatisation should be considered. In view of the limited benefits of privatisation, alternative policies that can achieve the objectives of privatisation without transfer of ownership should be considered

The privatisation of public utilities

Die Dissertation beleuchtet verschiedene Aspekte der Privatisierung und Liberalisierung in den Infrastruktursektoren Wasser, Transportwesen, Energie, und Postdienstleistungen. In einer Analyse des Britischen Eisenbahnsektors über einen Zeitraum von über 40 Jahren, wird der Frage nachgegangen ob die durchgeführten Reformen und Restrukturierungsmaßnahmen zu Änderungen in der Kosteneffizienz oder Qualität geführt haben. In einem zweiten Essay wird auf Basis einer Stichprobe mit über 2000 öffentlichen und privaten Infrastrukturunternehmen untersucht ob, und in welchem Ausmaß, Unterschiede im Hinblick auf finanzielle Kennzahlen erkennbar sind. Im letzten Kapitel wird in einem theoretischen Model ein Auktionsmechanismus vorgestellt, welcher die optimale Laufzeit bei Monopol-Konzessionen ("franchise bidding'') offenbart. Dabei wird unterstellt, dass die Bieter über mehr Informationen als der Regulator verfügen und der Mechanismus daher die Bieter dazu veranlasst, zumindest einen Teil dieser Informationen dem Regulator bekannt zu geben ("truth revelation'').The thesis presents three essays on privatisation and market reform in infrastructure industries. An analysis of the British railway sector over a period of 40 years investigates whether the privatisation and divestiture of the former state monopolist led to performance improvements. Statistical and econometric analysis highlights the importance of scale economies. Further, there are strong suggestions that while liberalisation initially led to an increase in cost efficiency, performance deteriorated over time. The second essay looks at a very broad sample of over 2000 publicly and privately owned utilities in OECD countries. A range of performance measures are used to establish that market reform and private ownership have a statistically and economically significant impact on firm profitability and efficiency. Sub-sample analysis further suggests that the effects are not uniform across industries. Building on some stylised facts, the third essay builds a theoretical model of contract length in a monopoly franchise bidding system. In particular the model introduces a mechanism which can induce bidders to reveal the total surplus-maximising contract length to the uninformed regulator

Factors Influencing Customer Satisfaction towards E-shopping in Malaysia

Online shopping or e-shopping has changed the world of business and quite a few people have decided to work with these features. What their primary concerns precisely and the responses from the globalisation are the competency of incorporation while doing their businesses. E-shopping has also increased substantially in Malaysia in recent years. The rapid increase in the e-commerce industry in Malaysia has created the demand to emphasize on how to increase customer satisfaction while operating in the e-retailing environment. It is very important that customers are satisfied with the website, or else, they would not return. Therefore, a crucial fact to look into is that companies must ensure that their customers are satisfied with their purchases that are really essential from the ecommerce’s point of view. With is in mind, this study aimed at investigating customer satisfaction towards e-shopping in Malaysia. A total of 400 questionnaires were distributed among students randomly selected from various public and private universities located within Klang valley area. Total 369 questionnaires were returned, out of which 341 questionnaires were found usable for further analysis. Finally, SEM was employed to test the hypotheses. This study found that customer satisfaction towards e-shopping in Malaysia is to a great extent influenced by ease of use, trust, design of the website, online security and e-service quality. Finally, recommendations and future study direction is provided. Keywords: E-shopping, Customer satisfaction, Trust, Online security, E-service quality, Malaysia

Proceedings of the 21st International Congress of Aesthetics, Possible Worlds of Contemporary Aesthetics Aesthetics Between History, Geography and Media

The Faculty of Architecture, University of Belgrade and the Society for Aesthetics of Architecture and Visual Arts of Serbia (DEAVUS) are proud to be able to organize the 21st ICA Congress on “Possible Worlds of Contemporary Aesthetics: Aesthetics Between History, Geography and Media”. We are proud to announce that we received over 500 submissions from 56 countries, which makes this Congress the greatest gathering of aestheticians in this region in the last 40 years. The ICA 2019 Belgrade aims to map out contemporary aesthetics practices in a vivid dialogue of aestheticians, philosophers, art theorists, architecture theorists, culture theorists, media theorists, artists, media entrepreneurs, architects, cultural activists and researchers in the fields of humanities and social sciences. More precisely, the goal is to map the possible worlds of contemporary aesthetics in Europe, Asia, North and South America, Africa and Australia. The idea is to show, interpret and map the unity and diverseness in aesthetic thought, expression, research, and philosophies on our shared planet. Our goal is to promote a dialogue concerning aesthetics in those parts of the world that have not been involved with the work of the International Association for Aesthetics to this day. Global dialogue, understanding and cooperation are what we aim to achieve. That said, the 21st ICA is the first Congress to highlight the aesthetic issues of marginalised regions that have not been fully involved in the work of the IAA. This will be accomplished, among others, via thematic round tables discussing contemporary aesthetics in East Africa and South America. Today, aesthetics is recognized as an important philosophical, theoretical and even scientific discipline that aims at interpreting the complexity of phenomena in our contemporary world. People rather talk about possible worlds or possible aesthetic regimes rather than a unique and consistent philosophical, scientific or theoretical discipline