What the U.S. Can Learn from the Latin American Power Development Model The World Turned Upside Down

Abstract

At the academy, the view has been for several years that the UK
experience will set the model for the U.S. deregulation. And in regula-
tory theory, in the U.S., this may ultimately be the case, outside of the
strongest traditional integrated utility bastions.
Glancing up over the scholarly journals, however, practical observ-
ers of indu stry realpolitik see a different model: oligopoly. FERC has
mainly focused on the use of market power by home team suppliers to
lim it local competition. The reality (as Leonard Hyman recently ob-
serv ed ) is more likely to be one of coalescence at the local market level
of thr ee of four energy providers-major pipeline and power companies
reaching into service territories and vying with the local gas and electric
distributors which will be bulking up . The larger issue , H yman sug-
gests, is whether, as in the department store and banking fields , the
energy market will go at least regional and possibly national. He sug-
gests that these are the probable growth patterns for emerging growth
companie s.
Not vedd y "British economist," that. But very like the outlines of
the stra tegies emerging South of the Border , where a mi xture of
privatizat ion and demand growth is giving the opportunity for bold and
suggestive pla y to the strategies which the larger utilities and the for-
ward vertically integrating oil companies are undertaking. In fact, to see
the future profile of their would-be hegemony, Ll.S, regulators would be
wiser to look South than East