Nearly a decade ago, in 2016, then Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) Chairman, Rod Sims, delivered a speech on the growing concentration of Australian industry.
New research undertaken by Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) economists has concluded that increased market concentration in some sectors of the economy has weighed on productivity.
The RBA economists found that productivity, and therefore economic output, would have been 1%–3% higher by mid-2017 if there had been a similar level of competition in key sectors during the mid-2010s compared with the same period in the previous decade:
