Assessing the Impact of Competition Policy Reforms on Australia's Infrastructure Performance
31 July 2007
By Greg Houston et al.
This report, prepared for the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC), examines how best to analyze the success of competition policy reforms, including the introduction of arrangements for third party access to essential services and the restructuring of public monopolies to facilitate competition, as they relate to various Australian infrastructure industries. The authors conclude that no single metric or indicator can signify success alone, but a comprehensive fact-based inquiry that considers a suite of indicators, from broad general equilibrium modeling scenarios to specific partial indicators such as price movements, can provide a very good indication of success. Each indicator represents a "symptom" of successful reform, the more of which that are present the more confident one can be of a robust diagnosis of success.
