New bulletins for April

Our second "batch" of bulletins for 2003 are now available to download, and cover a wide range of topics, from competitive strategies to the valuation of privatised utilities. Particularly timely is Southern Discomfort, based on analysis of the pay of 250,000 employees for the Learning and Skills Council, which suggests that the greatest gap between the public and private sector pay is in the outer South East rather than London itself.Three of our bulletins report new developments in regulatory work. Comparing apples with apples explains how Frontier has developed an international database of energy companies that enables regulators to assess the efficiency of monopolies in their jurisdiction by benchmarking them against similar enterprises. A way of resolving another common regulatory problem, valuing the regulatory asset base, is described in Starting from where?, while a new approach to the regulation of long-term concessions is suggested in Water under the bridge.Scarcity is in short supply, the fifth of this "batch" of bulletins, illustrates our approach to competitive strategy. By constantly asking the deceptively-simple question, "why can no one else do that?", we apply the same rigour as we are used to deploying in competition cases to the economic analysis of sustainable competitive advantage. In developing our growing strategy practice out of competition work, we feel like poachers turned gamekeepers. Or is it the other way round?