Microeconomic reform

Abstract

Introduction Over the past 30 years governments in Australia introduced a set of policies that have come to be known as 'microeconomic reform'. These policies shared a defining characteristic: the intention to enable individual agency and markets to play greater roles in economic activity. The extensive scope and scale of the policies made microeconomic reform a (perhaps the) major theme of economic policy making in Australia during this time. Reform encompassed many areas of economic activity - finance, manufacturing, the government sector, and markets for agriculture, communications, utilities and labour - and a wide variety of policy changes, including removing barriers to entry to market..