The Competitive Structure of the Australian Meat and Livestock Industries

n1ere has been a longstanding intcn:•st in tl1c degree of competition in the Australian meat and livestock industTie!i.Various govcmmcnt and industry inquitics have c.xamined aspe.cts of oligopsoni.sticpdcing practices hy wholesalers.processors and retailers, labour relations in meat processing.vertical integration and fm.•cign ownership, etc.No consensus has emerged, but th1.~ suspicion of noncompetitive behaviour remains.In this paper.a model developed by Hdloway based on the conjectural variations of noncompetitive fin••IS l~ applied to Australian meat industry data.In the bt.l<;e model, the lamb industry was found to generate pricing patterns consistent with competitive market behaviour.while the heef industry w~l<J found to show very strong evidence of noncompetitive market behaviour and the pork industry showed some departure from perfect competition.Sensitivity analyses were undertaken, and the rcsulL<; were found to vary with differences in some of the underlying tL~sumptions.'These firdings have important implications for the choice of conceptuaJ frameworks and empirical implementations to model these industries and to assess the impacts of ne\v technologies.policy interventions and promotion campaigns.