The world’s leading experts in economic productivity analysis are at The University of Queensland this week for the 2004 Asia-Pacific Productivity Conference.
This is the first time the conference is being held in Australia and it has attracted 148 delegates from 29 countries and 16 of the pre-eminent experts in the field.
The Centre for Efficiency and Productivity Analysis (CEPA), which was recently established within the School of Economics at UQ, is hosting the conference which has run for the past three days.
CEPA director Professor Prasada Rao said participants from both universities and various business and government organizations have been attending, reflecting the Centre’s dual interests in the development and refinement of performance measurement techniques, and the application of these techniques in a range of public and private sector industries.
“The conference is providing an excellent opportunity for people within Australia and the Asia-Pacific to learn about the latest developments in this area of research,” Professor Rao said.
“And we can also learn from the experiences of others in applying these techniques.”
Support from sponsors, such as the Queensland Competition Authority, the Australian Bureau of Statistics, the Productivity Commission, the Commonwealth Department of Communications, Information Technology and Arts and Queensland Treasury, has meant organisers have been able to bring a range of high profile international speakers who will present the latest research on incentive regulation of infrastructure firms; the effect of information technology on productivity; and accounting for risk in performance measures.
“We are also very pleased with the wide range of interesting contributed papers that will be presented at the conference,” Professor Rao said.
“These include applications in electricity supply, water supply, school education, universities, postal services, hospitals, manufacturing, agriculture, fisheries, forestry, banking, sea ports, hotels, plus bus and rail companies.
“A number of these studies address complex questions, such as how to incorporate quality measures in analyses of school performance, or how to account for pollution abatement activities in industrial applications.”
Media: For more information please contact Professor Prasada Roa (telephone 0402 913 516) or Professor Tim Coelli (telephone 0404 007 494). Further details and papers from the conference are available from the website www.uq.edu.au/economics/cepa/APPC2004
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