| Public utilities are the important providers of people's public products and significant component of public-owned economy, as well as the bottleneck of the socialist economic system reform. And today, in the face of the solemn promise that our government made to the World Trade Organization, the concern of public utilities becomes more urgent and far-reaching. Although it is irresponsible to say that we have never interfered public utilities, it is definitely accord with reality that the reform that we'v already carried on relied on administrative strength too much and the game rule of relevant market has never been set up. The writing of this text is excited by the intense impulse to penetrate the public utilities under the background in new era from the visual angle of law more, with the intention of finding a way on which law can do more to help this trade grow vigorously.Under this train of thought, this text applies ink to paper in the following several questions especially: (1) The economic characteristics of public utilities and their impact on corresponding policy. For one thing, what will the network ( and the concomitant large-scale effect and the progressively decreasing rule of cost) do to the demand of monopoly ? For another thing, what will the development of technology do to public utilities' cost function ( then to the market structure ) ? The two factors bring about the demarcation between natural monopoly link and competitive link inside the public utilities, which requires that we break monopoly actively in such condition that needs competition, and maintain exclusive right of management, restricting the abuse of monopolizing right at the same time, where range economic benefits or scale benefit of production and management is needed; (2) The positive meaning and limitation of the train of thought of dividing up and recombining of trades. Although there is no doubt that suchmeasures will do great favor to the adjustment to relevant market structure, it will completely be a dream to feel optimistic about the future of trade, if we ignore different demands of different industries and different links, and if we fail to form a scientific market behavior rule to consolidate the existing reform achievement; (3) On the compliment of legal regulation, this text insists on the following principles: we should develop both monopoly and competition, both trade legislation and special legislation, both anti-monopoly legal enforcement and the trade supervision simultaneously. A specialized anti-monopoly legal agency and a modern supervisory system arc both in great need. We ought to make sure that the two kinds of strength above always coordinate well to maintain the market order and promote the market performance together; (4) As to the concrete systems of the legal regulation, except advocating the division between government and utilities as well as the diversification of property right and investment, this text puts close attention to several matters to which various circles of society pay close attention in recent years, such as price confirmation, interconnection, etc.Except the introduction and conclusion, this text includes five parts altogether:The first part is the introduction of general theoretical question of public utilities monopoly. After the analysis on definition and characteristic, this part queries to the rationality of several classical theories that have being rationalizing the monopoly of public utilities.The second part presents some countries" legal practices and relevant regulations under WTO frame. Through analysis of these law practices, this article summarizes as follow: we should break unreasonable monopoly among public utilities and avoid insisting on the markets opening unconditional; we should do more just on the restriction of the monopoly position abuse but not on the change ofownership structure as before; we should also set up sound antitrust executive body and strict legal enforcement procedure, etc.The third part reviews and appraises Chinese r... |
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