Pricing in Australian Manufacturing*

The rate of change of prices of competing foreign products and the rate of change of costs of domestic production are both found to have positive impact on the rate of domestic price inflation in a cross section of Australian manufacturing industries over the period from 1968-69 to 1986-87. Prices of competing foreign products are found to have more impact, while production costs are found to have less impact, the higher is the level of domestic concentration, supporting the hypothesis that foreign and domestic competition have interactive effects on domestic prices.     

Competitive Neutrality in Access Pricing

This article examines the notion of competitive neutrality when setting access prices for vertically integrated bottleneck networks. In contrast to the claims of regulated firms (for example, Telstra), it is not possible to argue that access charges that involve unit prices in excess of short‐run marginal cost reflect competitive neutrality. That is, we demonstrate that in general models of downstream oligopoly, upstream prices that differ from marginal cost are not competitively neutral in the sense of placing integrated and non‐integrated firms on an equal basis.     

Leading Australian Cyclical Indicators: Current Results

This note follows the article by L. V. Defris, 'Leading Australian Cyclical Indicators, 1960–1975' in Review 475 and reports on the current movements of the Dynamic Deviation Reference Cycle and the Housing, Finance and 10 Leading Indicator Indices. The indices have been re-estimated by the methods described in that article on the latest available data, and the re-estimation results in minor changes in previously published values of the indices.     

Pricing Discretion and Price Regulation in Competitive Industries

Price capped firms enjoy a large degree of pricing discretion, which may harm customers and competition. We study two alternative regulatory regimes to limit it: the first regime (Absolute) places a fixed upper limit to the prices charged in captive markets, while the other regime (Relative) constrains the captive prices relatively to the competitive ones. Under the Relative regime, captive prices are only weakly lower and competitive prices are always higher than under the Absolute regime. However, the number of competitors and/or their output may be higher under the Relative regime. While the effects on aggregate welfare are ambiguous, there is some evidence that the Relative regime is more likely to increase consumers’ surplus and social welfare the more efficient are the competitors.     

Technological Change in Australian Manufacturing

In the modern era, the extent and character of technical change features prominently in discussions of productivity growth and movements in the competitiveness of manufacturing. While technical change is pervasive in modern manufacturing, it occurs unevenly. In this study, technical change is estimated by fitting dual cost functions for each of 38 sectors of Australian manufacturing over the 32 year period, 1968–69 to 1999–2000. The estimates show that technical change is heavily labour-saving in all industries, but that the overall rate of change, as measured by a rate of cost diminution, and the degree of bias towards saving labour, rather than capital or material, varies substantially across industries.     

The Most-Favoured-Customer Pricing Policy and Competitive Advantage

The paper investigates the effects on competition of the unilateral most-favoured-customer pricing policy. A model is considered in which a multimarket incumbent firm faces a threat of entry in one of its two markets. It is shown that contemporaneous most-favoured-customer clauses may change competition to the advantage of the incumbent both under strategic substitutes and strategic complements. If the duopolistic market is strong, the most-favoured-customer policy makes the incumbent 'tough' and may be used for entry deterrence purposes.     

Inflation and Capacity Constraints in Australian Manufacturing Industry

In the present paper we estimate a model of price-cost inflation for Australia using business survey responses of firms in the manufacturing sector. The data allow us to circumvent a number of key statistical problems, related in particular to the measurement of costs and structural changes in the model. Equally important, the data allow a new and more detailed perspective on the nature of supply constraints affecting inflation in the manufacturing sector. A new finding is that capital constraints have been more important in generating inflationary pressure than labour constraints or general indicators of capacity utilisation.     

Productivity Trends in Australian and New Zealand Manufacturing

The purpose of this article is to study relative trends in total factor productivity (TFP) between the Australian and New Zealand manufacturing sectors from 1986 to 1996. Since 1984 both economies have undergone major structural changes with varying degrees of speed and intensity. We use the Malmquist index to measure TFP growth and decompose it into an efficiency change and a technical change component. This decomposition provides extra insight on assessing relative productivity trends during a period of economic reform. The results indicate the Australian manufacturing sector exhibits better rates of individual factor productivity performance while multifactor productivity is estimated to be higher in New Zealand manufacturing. TFP growth in New Zealand is driven by technical rather than efficiency change. In fact, the New Zealand manufacturing average rate of efficiency change is estimated to be negative over the sample period.     

制造战略产生竞争优势的理论解释

如何挖掘生产系统的竞争优势是制造战略研究的主要内容。文章分别从资源基础理论、权变理论、制度理论和认知理论的角度对这一问题进行了分析,目的是为制造企业获取生产系统竞争优势提供基本思路。     

The Cost of Monopoly in Australian Manufacturing

This article looks at the deadweight loss arising from monopoly elements in Australian manufacturing under various assumptions and its relationship with the level of concentration.     

Protection and the Future of Australian Manufacturing

This article was written by Richard H. Snape, Professor of Economics, Monash University. It is a revised version of a paper presented at the convention of the Institute of Industrial Economics (University of Newcastle) on 'The Future of Manufacturing Industry In Australia', Terrigal, 29 April to 1 May, 1977.     

Structural Changes in Australian Manufacturing Industry*

The paper uses a neoclassical production function and historical data to test for structural stability in Australian manufacturing industry. The production function is an extended constant elasticity of substitution form in which factor substitution elasticity, returns to scale and market structure in output, capital and labour are testable hypotheses. Tests for structural changes in homogeneity and factor substitution elasticity relations are based on overall and individual tests of covariance analysis and also on a special version of the Swerling-Kalman filtering systems as proposed by Cooley and Prescott. The empirical findings possess desirable statistical properties and indicate the existence of structural instability in the industry. The evidence also repudiates the assumptions of unitary factor substitution elasticity, constant returns to scale and market competitiveness in output and factors of production.     

The Impact of Technical Change and Profit on Investment in Australian Manufacturing

This paper combines W.E.G. Salter's analysis of capital-embodied technical change with Kalecki's analysis of financing investment from retained profits to provide a Post Keynesian model of investment with process innovation, which is applied to data from Australian manufacturing industries. The approach to process innovation taken in this study is to identify new capital stock introduced through physical investment, which results in the older vintage stock being decommissioned as technologically obsolete. In the estimated model, the profit factor is used as a measure of the ability to invest, and the rate of labour productivity growth factor reveals the inducement to invest as this rate acts as a proxy for technical change in the Kaleckian investment-ordering model. The two factors combine to explain the accumulation process, both level and variability, and its link to technical change. In conclusion, this paper demonstrates that investment, incorporating technical change, enables industries to become sustainable into the uncertain future with varying states of investment instability.

…technical progress cannot be regarded as automatic and independent of accumulation. (Salter, 1966, p. 72)     

Australian Economic Growth: Nonlinearities and International Influences

This paper considers the extent to which fluctuations in Australian economic growth are affected by domestic and overseas economic performance. We investigate the performance of a range of nonlinear models versus linear models, comparing the models using Bayes factors and posterior odds ratios. The posterior odds ratios favour nonlinear specifications in which fluctuations in economic activity in the US affect Australia's economic performance. Our results suggest that an exogenous negative shock will be more persistent, lead to greater output volatility, and have a greater impact on growth, than a positive shock of equal magnitude.     

The Determinants of Firm Profitability in Australian Manufacturing

This study provides new evidence on the determinants of the profitability of Australian manufacturing firms by analyzing a unique firm-level data set of firm performance over the period 1984-93. The panel nature of the data permits the estimation of dynamic profitability models over the business cycle, to test both the persistence and cyclicality of firm profitability. Econometric results suggest that lagged profitability is a significant determinant of current profit margins, and that industry concentration is positively related to firm profit margins. Also, profit margins are found to be procyciical in concentrated industries but counter-cyclical in less concentrated industries.