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When I arrived at the Pentagon in 2009, the Obama administration was just getting its footing as caretakers of the War on Terror. Our focus then was truly global dominion. That meant, yes, killing and capturing whatever the intelligence process coughed up as bad guys no matter who they were or where they were. But […]

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Even after recent reductions, the UK end-user price of electricity is high by international standards. In January the price per KWh was 40.7 euro cents, compared to France c€29.1, Spain c€22.0, and the US c€16.3. High electricity prices damage UK competitiveness.The lack of competition in the electricity market is the main reason for this. And things can only get worse. For years, electricity has been only 20% of the energy market, so there is at least some competition from other sources. Soon, Net Zero 2050 policy implies that electricity will be nearly five times bigger.The problem stems from the fact that in 1989, Margaret Thatcher only partially denationalised the electricity market. A key element, the National Grid, remained a monopoly structure and the regulator Offer (which later became Ofgem), kept government in control.Today, both Labour and the Conservatives intend to return electricity to monopoly. Labour's argument is that we will need a central planning authority, 'Great British Energy'. This is supposed to save households £92. But how? Certainly not from a reduction in bureaucracy: it seems highly unlikely that this nominally independent but publicly owned authority will replace the 4,000+ Department of Energy Security and Net Zero's core staff. We can confidently expect greater bureaucracy as well as less competition in the sector under this plan.To the Conservatives, going green and expanding the power transmission infrastructure are the priorities. The UK presently spends hundreds of millions of pounds in constraint payments to energy generators, simply because the existing grid infrastructure to absorb all the energy produced; with increased reliance on electricity, better infrastructure is needed. But the Conservatives have no coherent plan on how to produce that extra electricity. They talk up nuclear but have made no commitments to any new reactors.If we are to reduce prices, secure supply and improve customers' experience, however, we need to complete the original aims of privatisation and introduce more competition within the electricity sector. Here's how.The National Grid should be replaced by privately-owned Distribution System Operators (DSOs), which would buy from generators and sell to households and business. Although DSOs would be largely regional, each customer location should be entitled to buy from any DSO nationwide. Fuel poverty payments should be funded by the Department of Work and Pensions, not the operators.In effect, each DSO would be a regional grid selling direct to consumers anywhere in the UK. They would balance electricity in and out, normally by buying and selling from/to each other, though national shortages/excesses would be traded with IMPEX (buying from/selling to) Europe. IMPEX would also be a grid, buying and selling to UK DSOs and European distribution companies. It would need to balance purchases with sales and breakeven or make a marginal profit. The best regulator is competition, and with greater competition in the electricity market, the Competition and Markets Authority should take over from Ofgem (but not set prices as Ofgem does).With these reforms, the original objectives of electricity privatisation — a competitive and consumer-focused industry — would finally be realised. This would give consumers a better deal and boost the UK's international competitiveness.

Last week brought more evidence of bipartisan consensus on China. Unfortunately, the consensus is do very little, while pretending otherwise.
The post US-China Competition Still One-Sided appeared first on American Enterprise Institute - AEI.

More people producing things leads to lower prices for consumers - all else being equal of course. Morrisons has begun matching its prices to Aldi and Lidl as new chief executive Rami Baitiéh mounts a fightback against the German discounters.The supermarket has pledged to match the price offered by Aldi or Lidl on more than 200 products, offering customers whichever price is lowest. The offer will cover everything from corn flakes and mince to canned tomatoes and baby wipes. Prices will be updated twice a week.One of the advantages of advancing age is that we've seen things happen before. Back a quarter century the big worry about British supermarkets was the uncompetitive nature of the industry. Net margins were up at 6% and the like of turnover - vastly high by international standards. Reports were written identifying triangular areas that one or t'other of the chains dominated and so on. Not much happened. Then Aldi and Lidl arrived. A different method of retailing, a smaller number of stock lines, different positioning, lower prices. At which point that competition started to eat the market - net margins for the industry are now in the 2 to 3% range. For everyone has had to do, these recent decades, what Morrisons is now doing. Cut prices to consumers to combat said competition.Those German and Austrian billionaire families which own those two insurgent chains have not done this for our interest. They've done it to amass those billionaire fortunes. But the effect has been to lower food prices for all of us. The capitalists competing for our custom is what produces that benefit to us.Sure, there are alternative ways of attempting to gain this result of an increase in consumer living standards. Venezuela famously decided that the President knew what things should cost and therefore everything should cost what the President said. The result was not an increase in living standards, rather the vanishing of everything from the marketplace.The standard example in the economic literature of this effect is indeed about the butcher and the baker, it's not their benevolence that feeds us, it's their regard for their own self-interest. The particular issue here being that free part of free markets. Which means that people are free to enter the market if they wish - which they have done and to our collective benefit.Free market competition for the win then.

We do grasp that the incentive to invest determines how much is invested. Labour's independent energy advisers have warned the party against watering down its £28bn green spending plans in advance of its promise to create a zero carbon electricity system by 2030.Experts at the climate thinktank Ember, which provided the independent analysis underpinning Labour's green targets, said growing international competition for low-carbon investment from the US and EU could leave the UK lagging in the global race for low-carbon energy.But that strikes us as complete nonsense.Pretty much by definition low-carbon energy is a domestic economic resource. We can't - or at least don't - pack it into ships or shovel it down pipelines and even interconnectors are hugely geographically limited. Renewable energy tends to be produced domestically to be consumed domestically. That's just the way it is.So, what global race? Sure, it might be a good idea that China gets more windmills than Britain does, might be a bad idea. But it's not one of any grand importance in the sense that if they get more then we can't have more.It's actually rather the other way around. We'd be perfectly happy if J Foreigner does all the hard development work, the subsidising of the stuff that doesn't work quite yet, then we install as and when all the kinks are worked out.Note that our critique here is very limited. We're not even commenting upon whether green is the way to go, we should or should not have more renewables and so on. Only on this idea that there's a race on and one in which Britain should subsidise more in order to win.What damn race?

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Weak competition on labour markets means wages are often set below the market-clearing level.

Competition policy has been based on a presumption of market equilibrium. Mushrooming corporate power has passed it by.

"Monopolies often fear competition more than they fear government: You can lobby government for ongoing favoritism but in a free economy, you must compete." ~ David Hebert, John Pinheiro, and Daniel Wagner

“The United States has reshaped how it uses military and economic tools to compete with China, Russia, and other adversaries. The United States is increasingly adept at deploying military assets, as well as a range of financial sanctions or trade deals, to weaken China or Russia's position and advance its own. Yet, the United States […]
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The general lesson here:Rail fares could be cut in half under government plans to allow trains to compete on the same lines, a leading rail body has said.Rail Partners, which represents private rail firms, suggested passengers could see huge reductions of between 15 and 50 per cent in ticket costs if the Government pushes ahead with its plan to increase the number of open access operators.This is simply how competition works. What limits the amount that Heinz can try to charge for baked beans is what others are willing to sell baked beans for. What limits the margin Sainsburys can charge on Heinz baked beans is the margin Morrisons, Waitrose, the Co Op and others are willing to accept on Heinz baked beans. And everyone is limited in what they can charge by the existence of those hundreds and thousands of substitutes that exist for baked beans (although not, of course, on a proper breakfast).How much we can be charged for a rail ticket depends upon all those substitutes - the price of a car journey, cycling, the bus, just not going and so on. Adding in also that direct competition, someone else offering the same journey but in a different steel tube, at a different price, will indeed reduce prices to consumers.Which would be good - consumers are made better off and that's the aim of our having even a civilisation, let alone an economy. Lower prices would, we expect, also entice some of those journeys by car, foot, cycle and just not going onto the substitute of the train ride. Which would, we assume, please the environmentalists. So, umm, yes. The interesting thing is therefore seeing what excuses are to be given for why it shouldn't be done, isn't it?

In my undergraduate dissertation, titled: An exploration into how neoliberal economic policies have impacted Britain's North - South divide in urban spaces since the 1980s, I explore how Britain's adoption of neoliberal policies furthered existing urban inequality through an ability to 'lock-in' existing variation and reinforce itself by coercing urban spaces to compete against each other. I emphasise the importance of viewing neoliberalism as a dynamic and contradictory framework as opposed to a static ideology, and encourage this to be mapped onto space, with a specific focus on urban spaces in Britain. This mapping enables the evolution and perpetuation of neoliberal ideology to be unpacked, with its ever-increasing influence on the living standards of citizens being key to understanding the geographic unevenness in British society.
The post Competition and Contradiction in Neoliberal Britain's Spatial Divide appeared first on Progress in Political Economy (PPE).

If American policymakers are serious about countering China's rise at the nexus of technology, and truly want to foster economic growth and innovation while maintaining global competitiveness, it is crucial to support and encourage a vibrant ecosystem of companies, while avoiding counterproductive efforts that hinder their potential.

The competition between the U.S. and China is a multi-dimensional contest involving technological, economic, military, and political elements. To accurately assess a nation's standing, the focus should shift from measures (raw numerical data) to metrics, which offer meaningful interpretations of these numbers.