Suchergebnisse

Economic reform in Australia certainly did not start with the Hilmer Report — it has been underway for the last 15 or so years. It began with financial deregulation and floating of the Australian dollar in the 1980s and the reduction of tariff protection, and includes more recent initiatives such as moving from the centralized wage fixing system to more flexible enterprise bargaining arrangements, restructuring of government business enterprises, developments in public administration and most recently the focus on competition policy.

"The aim of this paper is to describe in detail a set of newly developed indicators of the quality of competition policy, Competition Policy Indexes, or CPIs. The CPIs measure the deterrence properties of a competition policy in a jurisdiction, where for competition policy we mean the antitrust legislation, including the merger control provisions, and its enforcement. The CPIs incorporate data on how the key features of a competition policy regime score against a benchmark of generally-agreed best practices and summarise them so as to allow crosscountry and cross-time comparisons. The CPIs have been calculated for a sample of 13 OECD jurisdictions over the period 1995-2005." (author's abstract)

Operating a complex competition policy, the EU intends to ensure undistorted competition within the Single Market. Today, with competition being increasingly necessary for Europe in order to combat the challenges of globalisation, the global crisis has shed light on some of the existing weaknesses in the system, especially regarding consumer welfare. In this article, the author brings to light the importance of implementing an economic approach to competition policy. This approach offers more consumer protection as well as giving businesses the opportunity to freely choose the most profitable commercial practices available to them.

How will competition policy develop in the 1990s? Michael Beesley, a part‐time member of the Monopolies and Mergers Commission, explains how competition theory has developed and the likely consequences for policy.

Strategies to enhance Australia's international competitiveness need to embrace reform of key infrastructure service industries, reform of the regulatory environment, industrial relations reform and taxation reform. Key aspects of this reform agenda can only be addressed through a shared commitment by all levels of government. Ownership of the public utilities responsible for the nation's key infrastructure networks and services is divided among commonwealth, state and territory (and local) governments. Achieving a substantial lift in the productivity of these industries and ensuring the emergence of truly national infrastructure networks relies on agreement by all governments to public utility reform and the removal of barriers to cross‐border competition. Moreover, the regulation of industries, occupations and businesses is primarily the responsibility of state and territory governments, hence regulatory reform also requires a cooperative approach by all governments.While most jurisdictions have taken some steps to reform public utilities and to deregulate certain product markets, to date reform has been piecemeal. A more systematic approach to removal of impediments to competition across the board is likely to be necessary to lift the overall competitiveness of the Australian economy. The agreement by the commonwealth and all states and territories to implement the National Competition Policy (NCP) not only provides the necessary shared commitment to reform across the board, it also provides the rewards and sanctions needed to sustain that commitment in the face of certain resistance from vested interests.