Creating Competitive Markets: The Politics of Regulatory Reform. Edited by Marc K. Landy, Martin A. Levin, and Martin Shapiro. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2007. 368p. $59.95 cloth, $29.95 paper.

For the past 30 years, policy innovation in the United States and much of the industrialized world has centered on “liberalizing” markets and allowing competitive forces to unleash human creativity and flexibility. Legislators have relaxed restrictions on competition in telecommunications, banking, airlines, and a variety of other markets, ostensibly to enhance the efficiency of each market and thereby benefit both consumers and producers. This wave of “deregulation” has had a decidedly mixed track record. The easing of U.S. banking restrictions in the 1980s, for example, facilitated a host of financial innovations within the sector, but also contributed to the disastrous savings-and-loan crisis of the late 1980s. The deregulation of the airline industry in the late 1970s was deemed a success for consumers, but the promotion of competition in electricity markets in the 1990s was less successful.