ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews the role that consumer councils may be expected to play in the context of public control of public enterprises. Consumer agencies can be made to occupy a purposeful place in a control system designed to ensure the most appropriate proximity between what and how the enterprise supplies, and what and how the consumers want. On a major matter of interest to consumers, namely pricing, there is a basic constraint on a consumer council’s control status. It is likely that in several public enterprises extra-enterprise criteria assume far greater significance than simple cost-price equations. The status of the consumer councils has to be raised to that of public-funded agencies analagous to, say, price commissions and monopoly commissions, instead of making them dependent on the finances and other help from the enterprises concerned.
