Female athletes have long faced obstacles to competition.
In California, private utilities, which supply 80% of customers, lost their monopoly last year; municipally-owned utilities are not yet obliged to open their markets.The removal of legal obstacles to competition, says Graham Shuttleworth of National Economic Research Associates, a consultancy, is only one of two steps in opening electricity markets.
"Keeping the Canadian border closed is an obstacle to competition and is serving to maintain artificially high prices for drugs in the United States," she said.
That would allow some foreign penetration while keeping newcomers out and so limiting the amount of competition.In Spain, a serious obstacle to competition is that the Iberian power grid is poorly connected to the rest of Europe.
Number portability removes a major obstacle to competition, particularly for business customers who need to keep their telephone numbers and are the most coveted customers because they have high monthly bills.
But the reformist drive is weakening visibly.Pier Luigi Bersani, the economic development minister, has implemented two reform packages that removed mostly petty obstacles to greater competition and efficiency from restrictions on the sale of non-prescription drugs to penalties for closing bank accounts.
As for the EU's "Lisbon agenda" of economic reform, Italy has consistently come out bottom in the scorecards of the London-based Centre for European Reform although that may change now that a liberal-minded Europe minister, Giorgio La Malfa, is in charge of Italy's Lisbon strategy.The obstacles to greater competition in Italy are legion.
"Accused of raising obstacles to free competition, RFI released a statement speaking of the need for physical barriers between railway property and public streets, a need that only became urgent the day people could buy a ticket for a rival train".
Further European economic integration would unlock substantial efficiency gains, in particular if it dismantled many obstacles to cross-border competition that still exist, in spite of all the efforts to build the single market.
It measures the degree of state control, barriers to competition and obstacles to starting a new company, assigning a score to each market of between 0 and 6 (where 0 is the least restrictive).
The US also desperately needs deep structural reform of its education system, clearing obstacles to introducing technology and competition.
