News :: Productivity Commission Report Found Wanting

Two leading international economists have questioned the report by the Productivity Commission which recommends abolishing Australian territorialcopyright for book.

A study — co-written by Professor Oswin Maurer of the University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy and Professor Markus Walzl of Bamberg University, Germany — said the Commission’s recommendations lacked adequate quantitative and empirical evidence.

Before any action was taken on the Commission’s recommendations, Professors Maurer and Walzl called for additional research by the Australian Bureau of Statistics into issues missing from the Commission’s report. They warned:

it ignored freight and transportation costs;
it did not show that any price differences were statistically significant;
book prices could actually rise if territorial copyright was abolished, as a result of market consolidation and dominance;
the report was unable to estimate the impact of the recommendations on the range of
books written and published in Australia; and
with major developments in online purchasing under way in Australia, the report risked targeting the wrong problems.

This is the first review of the Commission’s report undertaken by economists. The authors are Oswin Maurer, Dean of the School of Economics and Management and Professor of Marketing and International Management at the University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy, and Markus Walzl, Professor of Economics at Bamberg University, Germany. Both are highly acclaimed advisors to the EU, national governments and to business. The Australian Publishers Association (APA) commissioned the study.

The APA’s CEO, Maree McCaskill, said it was clear the analysis behind the Productivity Commission’s recommendations was inadequate and could not be trusted.

“The Commission has been so determined to bulldoze its hardline free market dogma into law that it has nignored fundamental economic analysis,” she said today.

“Professor Maurer and Professor Walzl were recommended as internationally recognised advisors to governments and are experts in the very field the Commission was studying.

“It’s an unfortunate reflection on a major Australian institution that the Productivity Commission got this important study so wrong,” Ms McCaskill said.

“We are urging the Government to look closely at the Maurer-Walzl study before it reaches a decision on the Commission’s recommendations,” she added.