Australian Competition and Prices Policy

John P Nieuwenhuysen and Neville R Norman
Croom Helm, London, 1976

 

Publisher's description

"This book is an important addition to the study of controls in a mixed economy. The special contribution which it makes is to provide a critical survey of recent Australian industrial policy, and to elucidate the general milieu of policy dismemberment to which Australian economic arrangements have been prone. The book also has the special feature that it is concerned under one cover with topics normally (in the Australian context) treated disparately - competition, tariffs, prices, wages, and general policy coordination.

It surveys recent Australian policy in three important areas of industrial regulation - trade practices, tariffs, and prices justification. It also reviews the interplay of these aims of policy in the conext of the great array of (sometimes conflicting) devices of micro and macro economic management in Australia. Chapter One traces the history of the Trade Practices Act 1965-1974. Chapter Two reviews the 1974 Trade Practices Act. Chapter Three is concerned with competition from afar, i.e. with the impact of tariff changes on Australian industry, especially in the last few years. Chapter Four critically assesses the criteria employed in Australia's latest experiment with private sector price surveillance, the Prices Justification Tribunal. Chapter Five is entitled 'Policy Coordination', and describes the way in which price and competition policy in Australia has been undertaken within the context of a disjointed, dismembered collection of policy instruments (including an uncoordinated and indeed at times countervailing wages policy). Some of these instruments of policy are the surviving accretions of a forgotten past; others are the devolved authority of latter day Parliaments.'

Table of contents

Introduction

Chapter 1. Trade Practices Policy before 1974

Chapter 2. The Trade Practices Act, 1974

Chapter 3. Tariffs: Competition from Afar

Chapter 4. The Prices Justification Tribunal

Chapter 5. Policy Co-ordination

Notes

Appendices

1. Section 48 Consultation under the 1965 Trade Practices Act

2. Resale Price Maintenance Cases Brought by the Trade Practices Commission, 1973-4

3. List of Trade Practices Cases Reported in Law Reports

4. Survey of Some of the Effects of the Prices Justification Tribunal on Industry

Bibliography

Index

Author information (from the book)

Dr. John Nieuwenhuysen is a graduate of the Universities of Natal and London (London School of Economics). Among other posts, he has been an economic adviser to the Department of Trade and Industry in London. He is Reader in Economics and Chairman of the Department of Economics, at the University of Melbourne.

Dr Neville Norman is a graduate of the Universities of Melbourne and Cambridge and is currently Senior Lecturer in Economics at the
University of Melbourne.