Network utility price regulation in Australia in the pre-first world war years

Malcolm Abbott

Competition and Regulation in Network Industries, 2024, vol. 25, issue 1, 3-18

Abstract: Australia has a long history of privately owned utility price regulation, one that is little known. This price control was designed to restrain the market power of several utilities (gas, rail, tramways, electricity, and water). The purpose of this paper, therefore, is to establish what types of price control that were used in Australia in the utilities sector before the First World War and to determine the degree to which this price control influenced efficiency. As price levels in this era were set in legislation, the lack of flexibility led to less-than-optimal outcomes, and eventually and led to new approaches were developed after 1912 to the utilities that remained in private ownership, and in some cases influenced the movement in Australia towards government control.

Keywords: Market structure; regulated industries; utilities; monopolies; D42 market structure, pricing, and design: Monopoly; K23 regulation and business law: Regulated industries and administrative law; L98 industry studies: Transportation and utilities: Government policy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/17835917231225749 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:crnind:v:25:y:2024:i:1:p:3-18

DOI: 10.1177/17835917231225749

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Competition and Regulation in Network Industries
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().