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  • Private and Public Enterprise in Europe: Energy, Telecommunications and Transport, 1830–1990
  • Tim Leunig
Robert Millward . Private and Public Enterprise in Europe: Energy, Telecommunications and Transport, 1830–1990. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005. xix + 351 pp. ISBN 0521835240, $90.00 (cloth).

Bob Millward is the right person to write a comparative volume on the role of the state and the market in creating, developing, and maintaining network utilities in energy, transport, and communications in Europe. He has already done much work covering a variety of aspects of this topic, and he understands the industries and the political issues involved.

This volume is halfway between a research monograph and a textbook. Though based largely on secondary sources, it is not comprehensive, even in the way that one might expect of a textbook. In general, this formula is not to be recommended, but is necessary in this case: almost all existing work looks only at one country without trying to find similarities across other countries. This is a serious omission on the part of the profession. This book represents a worthy first stab at filling this gap, and others who follow in Millward's [End Page 188] footsteps will owe him a debt of gratitude for bringing together the literature and sources, as well as raising a number of issues.

Millward wants to know whether common factors can explain the relative importance of public and private ownership in different industries, different countries, and in different periods. Do factors such as ideology, technology, and risk have similar effects in different places and at different times? When does government choose to regulate, to subsidize, to own, or to do nothing at all? These are good questions, and it is frustrating for the reader—and no doubt more so for the author—that Millward finds the commonalities frustratingly few and far between. Yes, governments are always needed at some level when there are issues of rights of way. However, sometimes, governments seem to be involved when risks are high, and sometimes when risks are low and returns are certain. Sometimes, socialism appears to lead governments to intervene, but other government interventions look pretty capitalist, with government (especially, municipal government) running its industries for profit on similar lines to any for-profit company.

The book is divided into three sections, covering from 1830 to 1914, 1914 to 1945, and 1945 to 1990. Each section has a chapter on each area in which the public sector had a role, but the focus of the chapter varies (appropriately) with the period. Thus, for example, the chapter on energy in the first section looks at the creation of electricity supply, tramways, and new regulatory regimes, while the chapter in the interwar era looks instead at the building up of national electrical grids, and the postwar chapter considers energy security. Equally, the transport chapters cover the development of railways, the movement from rail to road, and the growth of aviation, respectively. This means that the reader can consider the role of government and regulation at important periods in the history of each sector.

Against that framework, driven by the limitations of both the literature and space, the reader has never been given a comprehensive and systematic European-wide guide to regulation and ownership for an industry till today. Indeed, some sections have little comparative material at all: as Millward himself notes of the section on the urban water supplies and public health “much of what follows relates to Britain” (p. 42). This is a shame, as this, surely, is a perfect area on which to investigate the sort of ideology-light governments that Millward notices as responsible for much of the growth in public enterprise throughout Europe. It doesn't matter whether one is of the left or right, whether one cares about the poor or not, good sewerage is an important public health issue for enterprising societies to take over action. [End Page 189]

Where Millward is strongest is in documenting the sheer range of experience, in making it manageable, and in giving some structure, however, light, to what happened. Early variety can be explained, at least in part, by the ability of different states to...

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