Cross subsidies have always been implicit in Australian telecommunications pricing, partly as a consequence of political pressures. Telecom's fully distributed costs approach results in an estimate of their costs far higher than the Bureau of Transport and Communications Economics' incremental...

Australian telecommunications pricing has developed in an environment that 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 that...

The diesel fuel rebate scheme which returns most of the excise on diesel fuel used off-road by agricultural and mineral producers has been debated. Removal could cause three inefficiencies (input choice distortion, deadweight losses on reduced exports, and flow-on inefficiencies in domestic...

Fluid milk marketing in Australia is generally associated with an administered system where free market forces are unable to operate due to public intervention. Such interference creates a situation where, as Throsby [6, p. 243] puts it, 'returns to the fluid milk sector are maintained by...

The case for timed local calls (TLC) is overwhelming on both equity and efficiency grounds. However, Telecom's example of a pricing structure for (TLC) would probably have raised revenue substantially. The efficiency effects depend on the structure of local prices and on what is done with the...

The Australian Housing Allowance Voucher Experiment (HAVE) appears to be a radical change in Government policy towards low-income housing. There are moves to remove subsidies in kind, by raising government dwelling rents to market levels, and to replace them with housing allowances payable to...