بهره وری و کارایی در صنعت برق استرالیا

Australia's electricity supply industry has been through a period of reform over the last 10 years. The purpose of this paper is to analyse the changes that have occurred to the Australian electricity supply industry over the past 30 years, in order to evaluate to what degree these reforms have improved the productivity and efficiency performance of the industry.

Over the past 20 years, the Australian Federal and State governments have made considerable efforts to improve the efficiency and productivity of the electricity supply industry. Before 1991, the Australian electricity supply industry consisted of a series of state-based, government owned, mainly vertically integrated electricity authorities. Since the 1991 publication of the Industry Commission's (1991) report on energy generation and distribution, these entities have been broken up into their constituent parts (generation, transmission, distribution and retail): the majority of states linked into a national market, competition introduced into the wholesale electricity market, and retail competition introduced for large consumers. In two states, electricity assets have also been privatised.

In this paper, a DEA Malmquist approach has been used to estimate total factor productivity of the electricity supply industry, broken down into its state-based constituent parts over the period 1969 to 1999. The results indicate that there has been a substantial improvement in the performance of the industry since the mid-1980s. The beginning of this improvement pre-dates the substantial restructuring of the industry in the early 1990s although the improvement in the productivity performance of the industry did speed up after 1991. It should be noted, however, that, according to the study by Whiteman (1999), there is still scope for further improvements.