European gas market liberalisation: competition versus security of supply?

In 1998, the European gas market reform was introduced with the aim of completing the European internal market and enhancing the economic competitiveness of the European Union by promoting efficiency gains and affordable energy prices within the gas sector. Since the European Union had decided to perceive natural gas as a commodity, and to abandon the institutional logic that conceived the gas industry as a public utility, a massive restructuring of the European gas market and its related governance took place. This book enhances the understanding of this evolutionary multilevel process and the introduction of competition by means of regulation. The PhD thesis identifies the driving factors behind the failure of regulatory regimes to converge towards a European best-practice model and considers the effects of the new market design on economic performance in the gas market. A public regulation approach is applied that combines New Institutional Economics with recent regulatory studies to not only capture classical economic performance indicators but also to account for objectives related to public service such as security of gas supply. The conceptual framework, and its empirical application, demonstrates that at least two distinct institutional logics are present and responsible for the lack of convergence of regulatory regimes towards the European best-practice model, which the European gas reform had envisaged. Both the quantitative and the qualitative analyses undertaken suggest that the objective of security of gas supply is gaining greater importance vis-à-vis competition in the regulatory choices of European member states.