IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/wpa/wuwpmh/0307001.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Railway regulation in 19th Century Britain: the economic rationale and legacy of Gladstone and Chadwick

Author

Listed:
  • Mark F. Bailey

    (University of Ulster)

Abstract

This paper examines the economic rationale of the ideas of Gladstone & Chadwick on railway regulation and the legacy of their ideas. In 1844 Gladstone proposed and implemented what we would now call price and quantity regulation whereas in 1859 Chadwick proposed competition "for the field", i.e. the establishment of a temporary monopoly or franchise, for a given period. The thinking of Gladstone had been influenced by the classical school of economic thought, most notably J R McCulloch, whilst Chadwick had ideas influenced by his association with Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill. This ideas still impact today; the basic pattern of price and some quantity regulation inaugurated by Gladstone was not abolished until the 1960 Transport Act whilst Chadwicks idea of temporary licenses or franchises came back into vogue when the railways were privatised in 1997.

Suggested Citation

  • Mark F. Bailey, 2003. "Railway regulation in 19th Century Britain: the economic rationale and legacy of Gladstone and Chadwick," Method and Hist of Econ Thought 0307001, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    • Handle: RePEc:wpa:wuwpmh:0307001
    Note: Type of Document - Acrobat PDF; prepared on IBM PC; to print on A4 Acrobat PDF; pages: 28 ; figures: included. 28 pages, Acrobat PDF, A4
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://econwpa.ub.uni-muenchen.de/econ-wp/mhet/papers/0307/0307001.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Britain; nineteenth century; railway regulation; classical school; J R McCulloch; Edwin Chadwick; John Stuart Mill;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • B12 - Schools of Economic Thought and Methodology - - History of Economic Thought through 1925 - - - Classical (includes Adam Smith)
    • L13 - Industrial Organization - - Market Structure, Firm Strategy, and Market Performance - - - Oligopoly and Other Imperfect Markets
    • L51 - Industrial Organization - - Regulation and Industrial Policy - - - Economics of Regulation
    • L92 - Industrial Organization - - Industry Studies: Transportation and Utilities - - - Railroads and Other Surface Transportation

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:wpa:wuwpmh:0307001. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: EconWPA (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://econwpa.ub.uni-muenchen.de .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.