The Marginal Cost of Australian Income Taxation*

When the financing of expenditure programmes involves a welfare cost, that cost should be considered part of the opportunity cost of the expenditure programme. In this paper, we explore some concepts of the welfare loss of taxing labour income. We correct some measures previously applied and estimate the marginal cost of Australian public funds. Using our measure of the cost of public funds, we explore the costs of policy options in the motor vehicle industry.     

The Law of Diminishing Marginal Utility in Alfred Marshall's Principles of Economics *

The goal of this paper is to clarify the content of the Marshallian Law of Diminishing Marginal Utility. The paper is divided into seven sections. In the first one, I present the eight formulations of the Law that I record in the Principles and the foundation that Marshall provides for it. In the second and third sections, I present a couple of objections raised by Marshall himself against the universal validity of the Law; in my opinion, his answer to them is not sound. I contrast my interpretation with those of the other authors. In the fourth section, The Law of Utility is distinguised from the Law of Demand. In section five, l present the two meanings in which Marshall employs the term ‘utility’: as pleasure, and as a formal notion. In section six, I attempt to build an explanatory framework for the encountered difficulties. Finally, the seventh section is devoted to conclusions.     

The Welfare Costs of the Australian Telecommunications Pricing Structure*

Australian telecommunications pricing has developed in an environment which is uncompetitive, subject to pressures to cross-subsidize and insufficiently cognizant of relevant costs and demands. STD and local call charges are too high and access charges too low. Compared with a structure which charged marginal usage costs and retrieved costs of subscribers' loops and overheads through access charges, the pricing structure has an estimated efficiency cost of about $240 m in 1985–86.     

Economic Issues Facing Electricity Supply Authorities

The slowing in the growth of electricity consumption in the early 1980s was accompanied by a significant increase in real unit costs in all Australian states. This article examines the economic issues facing government-owned electricity supply authorities under four headings: policy objectives including the question of whether the authorities should act as agencies to redistribute incomes; the estimation of future demand, especially the need to relate future demand estimates to likely changes in costs; supply aspects, including internal efficiency, cost of capital and size and reliability of generating plant; and pricing policies, particularly the need for time-of-use tariffs to improve capacity factors.     

The Marginal Costs and Benefits of Redistributing Income and the Willingness to Pay for Status

The effect of status on aggregate welfare is ambiguous for marginal reforms that redistribute income. If average consumption falls, the change in relative consumption increases household utility but reinforces the decrease in household labor supply, raising welfare cost. For parameterizations of the model developed here, reforms which lower average consumption increase aggregate welfare. Numerical calculations show that status increases marginal welfare cost and marginal net benefit for a demogrant reform. Redistributing to high income households may increase aggregate welfare depending on the definition of average consumption and if the willingness to pay for status increases with income.     

The Potential Benefits of Hilmer and Related Reforms: Electricity Supply

This article examines the impact of the elimination of x-inefficiency in the Australian electricity supply industry using a computable general equilibrium (CGE) model of the Australian economy. Data envelopment analysis and a stochastic production frontier model are applied to measure x-inefficiency in the electricity industry. The potential increase in total factor productivity resulting from microeconomic reform is introduced into the CGE model as a factor-augmenting technological change. The model is used to measure the macroeconomic effects of microeconomic reform of the electricity industry. The Monash model is also used to replicate the results of earlier studies by the Industry Commission (1995) and Quiggin (1997) and thereby to provide a basis for comparing the three sets of results. The results of the current study imply that the impact of microeconomic reform on economic growth could well be significant if only a small proportion of the benefits were to be reflected in terms of an increase in aggregate employment.     

The Social Marginal Valuation of Income: Australian Estimates from Government Behaviour*

Alternative public policies frequently incorporate distributional goals. The elasticity of the social marginal valuation of income, ε, can help to derive welfare weights for different individuals in different income groups. Estimates are presented of the elasticity of the social marginal valuation of income implied by the Australian personal income tax, in the period 1968–69 to 1975–76. Both equal absolute (EAS) and equal proportional sacrifice (EPS) models are used to infer the elasticity values. Using taxable income as a proxy for income, the consistent value of ε under EAS was found to range from 2.07 to 2.57; the EPS range was 1.76 to 2.40. A number of considerations suggested a best-guess magnitude of about 2.2. Caution is urged in the interpretation and use of these results.     

Costs under Regulation and Deregulation: The Case of US Passenger Airlines*

Privatization, the removal of regulatory control and similar changes in property rights within firms can be expected to shift cost functions downward and permit increased output, lower final service prices and more efficient resource allocation The US Airline Deregulation Act of 1978 was clearly expected to have these effects. This paper investigates whether the widely anticipated reduction in costs following the Airline Deregulation Act of 1978 actually occurred. We utilize an empirical procedure that explicitly takes the multi-product characteristics into account and identifies the various sources of changes in costs. The change in airline's costs are decomposed into components and separately measured to identify the effects attributable to deregulation A number of other countries are now considering important changes in the public ownership and control of their airline industries and a quantitative assessment of the actual effect of US deregulation on costs may be thought of as providing lower bound estimates of what might be expected in other countries.     

Risk Aversion and the Full Costs of Rent-Seeking*

Risk aversion is frequently postulated as one of the factors that lead to under-dissipation of rents. However, the formal analyses which have supported this contention and suggested that the effects can be large have focused solely on the expenditures of contestants, ignoring the associated costs of risk. The paper argues that this omission is wrong in principle, and that when corrected the presence of risk aversion in fact leads to substantial increases in the extent of rent dissipation, although an exception is when there is a very strong combination of risk aversion and asymmetry.     

The Emergence of Structural Faults on the Supply Side in Deregulated 'Energy Only' Electricity Markets

This article examines the effect of plant entry and exit in a deregulated ‘energy only’ electricity market. A partial equilibrium framework is presented that determines the optimal portfolio of base, intermediate and peaking plant for a given electricity load curve. An optimal result for Queensland is compared against the actual plant stock. Analysis of the portfolio indicates that deregulation is failing a key objective, namely enhancing dynamic efficiency, because too much base plant has been delivered. The research presents scenarios of structural corrections, using the theory of the generalised war of attrition to develop the cases. Results from simulation experiments are clear—consumers will secure lower electricity prices in the short run. But oversupply of base plant may suppress prices to such an extent that they fail to signal timely entry of peaking plant—the consequence of this failure being eventual price shocks and, potentially, load shedding.     

Theory and Application of Linear Supply Function Equilibrium in Electricity Markets

We consider a supply function equilibrium (SFE) model of interaction in an electricity market. We assume a linear demand function and consider a competitive fringe and several strategic players having capacity limits and affine marginal costs. The choice of SFE over Cournot equilibrium and other models and the choice of affine marginal costs is reviewed in the context of the existing literature. We assume that bid rules allow affine or piecewise affine non-decreasing supply functions by firms and extend results of Green and Rudkevitch concerning the linear SFE solution. An incentive compatibility result is proved. We also find that a piecewise affine SFE can be found easily for the case where there are non-negativity limits on generation. Upper capacity limits, however, pose problems and we propose an ad hoc approach. We apply the analysis to the England and Wales electricity market, considering the 1996 and 1999 divestitures. The piecewise affine SFE solutions generally provide better matches to the empirical data than previous analysis.     

On Nations’ Size and Transportation Costs*

This paper develops a noncooperative Nash model in which a closed border is opened to trade between countries that differ in size and transportation costs. the paper suggests an explanation as to why economists have not convinced policymakers to lift all barriers to free trade. the questions we pose are: Who will gain as a result of opening the borders? Is free trade beneficial to the two parties involved? Do they both share equally in the fruits of free trade? Which country, large or small, benefits most? It is shown that free trade is not beneficial to both countries.