Competitive Neutrality and State-Owned Enterprises in Australia: Review of Practices and their Relevance for Other Countries

Matthew Rennie and Fiona Lindsay

No 4, OECD Corporate Governance Working Papers from OECD Publishing

Abstract: This working paper provides a comprehensive overview of the competitive neutrality framework of the Australian Commonwealth as well as individual States. It reviews the history behind the framework and provides examples of cases brought before the respective complaints handling offices. Finally, the paper draws conclusions regarding the successes and failures of the Australian framework and its applicability to other jurisdictions. The working paper argues that Australia.s competitive neutrality framework can be viewed as highly successful overall. However, the success can probably only be copied by other countries if these are willing to undertake similarly profound reforms as were engendered as part of the Australian competition reforms in the 1990s with the active participation of the Productivity Commission. The factors behind Australia.s apparent success include: a reform program that applied both to SOEs and to specific industries; the flexibility to apply the framework differently in different geographic contexts; anchoring the commitment to competitive neutrality in strong administrative processes; regular reviews and reporting by individual jurisdictions on the progress of their reforms; clarity in communication to enhance a nationwide understanding of the goals and mechanisms to achieve those goals; transparent public benefit tests to establish the boundaries between commercial and non-commercial public activities; and transparent and politically independent review processes.

Keywords: competition policy; competitive advantages; competitive neutrality; corporate governance; sectoral reforms; state-owned enterprises (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: G30 G34 L4 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011-08-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-reg
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1787/5kg54cxkmx36-en (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:oec:dafaae:4-en

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in OECD Corporate Governance Working Papers from OECD Publishing Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().