It’s time for the regular Monday message board, where you are invited to post your thoughts on any topic. Civilised discussion and no coarse language, please. My suggested discussion starter: Back to school?
Month: January 2005
Some unsolicited advice for the United Iraqi Alliance
The Iraqi elections seem to have been about as successful as could have been hoped, and may represent the last real chance to prevent a full-scale civil war. The pre-election analysis suggests that the United Iraqi Alliance, the main Shiite coalition, will get the biggest share of the votes, but probably not an absolute majority. If so, their leaders will face two immediate choices.
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What I’m reading
I’ve just finished Who Rules? How government retains control in a privatised economy by Michael Keating. Keating’s basic analysis, with which I agree, is that governments are facing a problem of rising demands and bounded state capacity. Hence, wherever possible, they are economising on capacity, for example by using regulation rather than direct public provision of goods and services. Thus, the reforms of the 1980s and 1990s are seen, not as cutting back government but as making it more effective. An obvious inference is that, if the size of the public sector, relative to the economy as a whole, has remained roughly constant for the past 25 years, and the effectiveness of the state has been enhanced, then government is playing a larger role than before, contrary to the hopes of neoliberals and the fears of social democrats. I think this is broadly correct.
Not surprisingly, Keating has a more favourable view of the reforms, many of which he helped to implement, than I do. On almost every point, I felt he was a little too supportive of the reform agenda and a little too dismissive of the critics[1]. Still, it’s an important contribution to the debate, and well worth reading.
fn1. Interestingly, I get quoted a few times, but mainly for criticisms of the pre-reform status quo, such as the observation that industry policy in the era of tariff protection was ad hoc and incoherent.
PPPs and renegotiation: Citylink and Scoresby
One of the big questions about Public Private Partnerships is what happens, when the deal needs to be renegotiated in some way, 10, 20 or 30 years after it was signed. This story about changes to an interchange affecting CityLink in Melbourne is of interest. The deal is being financed in part by replacing some payments due to be made by Transurban (the Citylink operator) with a smaller upfront payment. The financial arrangements are too complex to permit a clear assessment, but one point is striking.
Last year Transport Minister Peter Batchelor said the Government wanted $200 million for the upgrade. Transurban said it wanted to pay only $150 million – the eventual figure.
So, starting with a a $50 million gap between the initial positions, Transurban got the whole $50 million and the public got nothing.
Related to this is an interesting kerfuffle over the Scoresby (Mitcham-Frankston) motorway. As many will remember, the Bracks government initially promised not to impose tolls, then reneged, copping a lot of flak in the process. The Opposition leader, Doyle, has promised to renegotiate and remove the toll. This has presented the Bracks government with interesting incentives. Usually governments involved in PPPS want to stress what a good deal they have got for the public, in terms of the toll revenue that has been promised the private ownership. But now the situation has been reversed. Faced with Doyle’s promise, the government and its agencies commissioned a PwC report[1] which said that scrapping the tolls would cost $7 billion, with a cost of $4.5 billion for buying out the project. By contrast, construction cost is about $2.5 billion plus “other financial costs” of $1.3 billion.
It appears from these reports that the value of the tolls that have been alienated is nearly three times the cost of building the road[2]. Of course, the government’s report has been produced under pressure to make the repurchase option look as unfavorable as possible. But then, the vast majority of published analyses of PPP projects suffer from the opposite bias.
What’s even more striking about this is that, in PPP circles, the Mitcham-Frankston project is being touted as a huge success, evidence that we are finally getting these things right. Something does not add up here.
fn1. The conclusions have been released, but the interesting bits like the traffic projections are, as usual, commercial-in-confidence. At least, when I asked for them, that’s what I was told.
fn2. Using the $4.5 billion buyback cost and accepting that some of the “other financial costs” would be incurred under standard procurement would give a less extreme result. But the $7 billion number is the one the government has been touting.
An emerald the size of a plover’s egg
Readers of my previous post will have noticed that I don’t know much about MMPORPGs In fact, I don’t do much gaming these days, though I chewed up untold amounts of then-scarce mainframe computer time playing Adventure in the 1970s. Still my foray into the field has left me the kind of excitement you get the first time you wander into one of these domains and find precious jewels lying about everywhere.
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Habib and proceeds of crime
As Mamdouh Habib returns from Guantanamo Bay, released without charge after three years, Attorney-General Philip Ruddock is suggesting that the government may seek to stop him selling his story, using legislation that prevents people gaining income from the proceeds of crime.
Contrary to some other commentators, I hope Habib sells his story and that the government makes good on its threat of legal action. I’d be very interested to see what information the government has on this man, whom they have effectively labelled a terrorist, and left to rot, first in Egyptian torture chambers and then in Guantanamo Bay. If they can show, even on the balance of probabilities, that Habib is a terrorist, then he shouldn’t get any money from media organisations, though he should still be free to tell his side of the story without payment.
And now that the issue has been raised, the heat is on the government. If they don’t act, it can reasonably be inferred that it’s because they couldn’t win, and given his statements on this and previous occasions, Ruddock should resign[1].
fn1. Fat chance, I know. But the presence of Ruddock and others like him is the main reason I’ll never be reconciled to this government, no matter how lame the opposition.
The Everquest Economy (crossposted at Crooked Timber)
The Economist has an interesting piece on the interaction between the economy in massively multiplayer games and that of the real world. The classic study of this question is Castronova’s analysis of the economy of Norrath, the setting for Everquest. Among various features of Norrath’s economy, one of the most interesting is trade with Earth through the sale of game items (weapons and so forth) via private treaty or on eBay[1]. This enables Castronova to estimate that the wage in Norrath is $US3.42 an hour, a figure that has some interesting implications.
At the Creative Commons conference last week, I heard a story to the effect that when the owners of one of these games tried to prohibit item trading they were sued and, in the course of litigation discovered that the plaintiff ran a sweatshop in Mexico where workers participated in the game solely to collect salable items. Clearly as long as the wage is below $3.42 there’s an arbitrage opportunity here. More technically sophisticated arbitrageurs have replaced human workers by scripted agents, working with multiple connections. Either way, arbitrage opportunities can’t last for ever, and are likely to be resolved either by intervention or inflation
The positive economics of all this are interesting enough. But how about policy analysis? Who benefits and who loses from this kind of trade, and do the benefits outweigh the costs?
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