The Impacts of Deregulation and Privatization on Cost Efficiency in New Zealand's Forest Industry

摘要

In this paper, we investigate whether deregulation and privatization induced changes in cost efficiency within the New Zealand wood industry. Unlike previous work, the effects of privatization, deregulation, and removal of log export bans are compared to determine which shock had the most influence on efficiency changes. Cost efficiency is measured by estimating stochastic frontier models using the recent cost function approach, which does not suffer from the endogeneity problems associated with stochastic frontier production function estimation.