American Deregulation and European Liberalisation

Abstract

‘Why?’, asked Nye Bevan, ‘look into the crystal ball, when you can read the book?’ This question is pertinent to what could happen to civil aviation in Europe if it were to be liberalised. There is no need to speculate about how it would develop, and it is largely pointless to do so, because the general answer can be found by discovering what has happened in the United States under deregulation. It would, of course, be foolish to suppose that the structure and performance of the American and European airline industries will ever be precisely the same, even if civil aviation were to be fully liberalised in Europe. Nevertheless it seems reasonable to suppose that the same economic forces would be at work and that the situation in Europe would come to resemble the one in the United States. This at least is the assumption which I shall make in this paper. What may be questioned is whether European civil aviation is likely to be fully liberalised within the foreseeable future. However I am making the assumption that it will, in order to discover what laissez faire might look like, and the Commission’s plans for liberalisation are far-reaching. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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