مقررات کنترل قیمت در شمال امریکا : نقش نمایه سازی و الگوبرداری

Price cap plans in regulation are designed to mimic competition. The authors present the index logic that underpins this rationale in North American plans and offer two statistical approaches – indexing and benchmarking – that play a role in determining industry and/or national productivity trends and economy and/or industry input price trends that are used to track the unit cost of the industry.

Price caps are used widely today in the regulation of network utilities. Under a price cap plan, rates are allowed to rise each year by the growth rate of a price cap index (PCI). The growth of the PCI is driven by an inflation measure, often adjusted by an offset called an X-factor. For instance, in the approach to index design used in Britain, the PCI is based on Britain's retail price index (RPI). The X-factor is calibrated to recover projected cost over the term of the indexing plan. Despite the influence of the British model, price caps actually have a longer history and a larger scale of application on the North American side of the Atlantic. The approach taken to price caps differs greatly in the United States and Canada and provides European regulators with a useful set of alternatives. Its simplicity makes it especially appealing in regions relatively new to utility regulation, such as Eastern Europe. North American regulation is also of interest because the large sets of data available on utility operations there have made possible the use of sophisticated econometric benchmarking methods. We discuss the rationale for the North American approach to PCI design in Section II and the implementation of price control plans in Section III. In Section IV, we provide applications of PCI design in power and gas distribution, which illustrate the role of indexing and benchmarking used in crafting a price cap plan. We offer concluding remarks in Section V.

We have shown that the primary focus of a North American price control proceeding is the calibration of the PCI to track the unit cost trend of the industry. This commonly requires the calculation of regional or national productivity trends and may also involve an index of industry input price trends. A standard stretch factor is commonly added to the X-factor to share the benefits of improved performance with customers. Alternatively, the X-factor can reflect the ongoing productivity performance of the group of companies to which it applies. In that event, there is no need for a stretch factor since accelerating productivity performance will raise the X-factor over time. Benchmarking can play a role in this regulatory system if desired. For example, it can be used to assess whether the cost performance of individual companies is good enough to warrant removal of the stretch factor. If the competitive market paradigm is the guiding principle of plan design, the salient issue in such benchmarking is not whether the company is on the efficiency frontier. That is because efficient performers in competitive markets earn superior returns. Superiority to the average efficiency standard has to date been a greater focus of North American regulators than the distance from the efficiency frontier. North American experience also shows the potential for more sophisticated econometric benchmarking techniques when large quality datasets have been accumulated. Proper statistical methods can be used to guide model specification. They can also be used to test hypotheses regarding utility efficiency. To deem a utility inefficient, for instance, it should be necessary to reject the hypothesis that the utility is efficient at a high level of confidence. The confidence interval for such a hypothesis test should be wider the smaller is the sample on which research is based and the less successful the model is in explaining cost variations. The North American approach to price control regulation is a simple and effective alternative to the five-year cost forecasts featured in British regulation. The construction and maintenance of the required indexes can be achieved by a small staff of well trained economists. The simplicity of the approach recommends it especially for use in European countries that are just beginning utility regulation.