IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/bla/ausecr/v31y1998i4p357-371.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Monitoring the Performance of Government Trading Enterprises

Author

Listed:
  • W.G. Waters II
  • John Street

Abstract

Total factor productivity (TFP) was used for some years as a single indicator for measuring performance of government trading enterprises in Australia. More recently there has been a shift in emphasis towards financial criteria, with little or no mention of TFP. But it is well known that financial measures can be inappropriate for enterprises with market power. We show that it is important to monitor both TFP and financial performance. TFP performance alone can be misleading and be achieved at the expense of financial performance—this is illustrated for Australian National Railways during the 1980s. TFP and financial performance can be directly linked, and this provides a better framework for performance assessment over time. We explore the relationship between productivity, price performance, and various financial measures.

Suggested Citation

  • W.G. Waters II & John Street, 1998. "Monitoring the Performance of Government Trading Enterprises," Australian Economic Review, The University of Melbourne, Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research, vol. 31(4), pages 357-371, December.
  • Handle: RePEc:bla:ausecr:v:31:y:1998:i:4:p:357-371
    DOI: 10.1111/1467-8462.00079
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8462.00079
    Download Restriction: no

    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1111/1467-8462.00079?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Shuji Yao & Zhongwei Han & Dan Luo, 2010. "Performance of the Chinese Insurance Industry under Economic Reforms," Books, Edward Elgar Publishing, number 12788.
    2. Vergés, Joaquim, 2014. "Evaluación de la eficiencia comparativa de empresas y entidades productivas: Indicadores y técnicas de análisis [Evaluating comparative efficiency of companies and productive entities: Measures and," MPRA Paper 58329, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    3. Joanne Loundes, 2001. "The Financial Performance of Australian Government Trading Enterprises Pre- and Post-Reform," Melbourne Institute Working Paper Series wp2001n05, Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research, The University of Melbourne.
    4. Productivity Commission, 2002. "International benchmarking of Australian telecommunications services," Microeconomics 0207009, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    5. Siew Hoon Lim & C.A. Knox Lovell, 2009. "Profit and productivity of US Class I railroads," Managerial and Decision Economics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 30(7), pages 423-442.
    6. Lovell, Knox, 2001. "Future Research Opportunities in Efficiency and Productivity Analysis," Efficiency Series Papers 2001/01, University of Oviedo, Department of Economics, Oviedo Efficiency Group (OEG).

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:bla:ausecr:v:31:y:1998:i:4:p:357-371. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Wiley Content Delivery (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/mimelau.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.