Options for greater public control in the water sector
Recent years have seen significant debate about the successes and failures of privatisation in UK utilities sectors and, in particular, whether changes in water company ownership would improve public outcomes. While past governments avoided calls to review the ownership model, the landscape has now shifted materially. With the increasing… Read More
Podcasts
AI and fairness: who captures the gains and who is bearing the costs?
Who benefits from AI’s economic value? Much of the discussion around AI focuses on the tasks the technology is replacing. But arguably just as important are the economic questions about competitive advantage: who is capturing the gains, and how widely are they being shared? In this episode of… Read More
From uncertainty to causation: a valuation perspective on life sciences disputes
How do you value a product that may never reach the market? How do you distinguish commercial opportunity from scientific possibility? How do you assess loss in markets shaped by regulation, reimbursement and patient behaviour? These are just some of the valuation questions that arise in life sciences… Read More
Modernising EU competition policy: from guidelines to outcomes
This special edition of Top of the Agenda was recorded at our 2026 Brussels conference, which hosted senior figures from the European Commission, national competition authorities, academics and the legal community to discuss one of the most significant developments in EU competition policy in two decades: the revision of… Read More
When does a discount become deceptive? An economic framework for the regulation of reference pricing
The use of ‘reference’ pricing—where a previous (or future) ‘was’ price is displayed alongside the current ‘now’ price to indicate a discount for customers—is a common feature across digital and physical markets. In supermarkets, retailers commonly advertise a headline Recommended Retail Price (RRP), or ‘was’ price, alongside the current… Read More
No water, no growth: tackling inefficient business water demand
Water is not typically thought of as a constraint on economic growth in England. Yet that is precisely what it is becoming. Commercial growth and new developments are being turned away because there is insufficient water to serve them. Some water companies are already exercising their powers to refuse… Read More
The energy trilemma in focus: the price of dependence
Europe’s approach to energy policy has been in transition since the 2022 energy crisis laid bare the continent’s dependence on imported fossil fuels. More recently, the outbreak of war in the Middle East and the subsequent disruption to global oil and gas markets have caused further challenges. This article… Read More
Oxera responds to the European Commission’s consultation on its Draft Merger Guidelines
We welcome the Commission’s work to consolidate more than two decades of decisional practice, economic analysis and case law into a single framework. The draft is a strong foundation for future merger enforcement, particularly in its treatment of non-price competition, efficiencies and the broader assessment of competitive effects. Read More
How does economic policy shape European markets?
In this episode of Top of the Agenda, Helen Jenkins sits down with Sir Philip Lowe, who spent over 40 years at the European Commission, to reflect on his career. From his early work in the 1970s responding to the decline of industries such as coal and… Read More
The two realities of operations: how process mining could reshape regulation
There are two distinct realities operating simultaneously in all organisations: (i) the theoretical, represented by policy documents, flowcharts and training manuals; (ii)the practical, or what actually happens across systems and teams and the necessary workarounds needed when things go wrong. Process mining is a data-driven discipline designed to uncover… Read More