Institutional Path Dependence in Port Regulation: A Comparison of New Zealand and Australia

James Reveley and Malcolm Tull

Chapter 10 in The World’s Key Industry, 2012, pp 158-179 from Palgrave Macmillan

Abstract: Abstract The Australian and New Zealand port industries in the post-World War II period exhibit strong elements of path dependence. Simply put, economic and political actors’ purposive decisions pushed the development of port institutions down a pathway which became hard to step off: institutional lock-ins impeded strategic flexibility and the growth of port productivity; inefficient macro- and micro-level institutional arrangements reduced Australian and New Zealand port efficiency. Given this experience, our chapter uses path dependence as a method to explain institutional stability and change within New Zealand’s and Australia’s respective port systems. While port institutions in both countries were slow to adapt to shifts in the wider industry environment, they eventually succumbed to reformist change. As we explain, this occurred more strongly in New Zealand through pathbreaking institutional transformation in 1989, the pressures for which mounted over several decades. In Australia, by contrast, there were many false starts and change was slower even after the ports were caught up in the federal government’s late 1980s economy-wide programme of microeconomic reform.

Keywords: Industrial Relation; Path Dependence; Freight Rate; Port Authority; Labour Market Reform (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

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:pal:palchp:978-1-137-00375-1_10

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.palgrave.com/9781137003751

DOI: 10.1057/9781137003751_10

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Palgrave Macmillan Books from Palgrave Macmillan
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().