Henry Ergas

Henry Ergas is a regulatory economist who has worked at the OECD, Australian Trade Practices Commission (now the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission) and the Australian Centre of Regulatory Economics (ACORE) Advisory Group. He chaired the Australian Intellectual Property and Competition Review Committee set up by the Australian Federal Government in 1999 to review Australia's intellectual property laws as they relate to competition policy. He is Adjunct Professor of Economics at the National University of Singapore and has taught at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, the Centre for Research in Network Economics and Communications at the University of Auckland, Monash University and at the Ecole Nationale de la Statistique et de l'Administration Economique in Paris. He was an independent contributor to a paper submitted to the U.S. FCC which cautions against imposing regulations that, while aimed at net neutrality, may cause costs that exceed the expected benefits.

In recent years Henry Ergas' career has been controversial in a number of respects:

• as an expert witness - In the 2005 Qantas-Air New Zealand case, Ergas was criticised by the Australian Competition Tribunal for uncritically pushing a party line, avoiding challenging questions and seeking to obscure the real issues in contention. Additionally, in 2006 a Federal Court judge dismissed much of Ergas's evidence in the Queensland Rail-Pacific National case, stating "In my view, Mr Ergas's argument is pure economic theory unsupported by the facts of the case." The Australian Financial Review suggested that economists and lawyers are now questioning whether any litigant would risk calling Ergas again.
• because of the failure of his consulting business Concept Economics and the overt support for the Liberal Party of Australia.

Recent Publications

• 2010 - (with Franceso Paolucci, Terry Hannan and Jos Aarts) ‘The Effectiveness of Health Informatics’, in Healthcare and the Effect of Technology: Developments, Challenges and Advancements, Stefane M. Kabene (Ed.), Healthcare and the Effect of Technology: Developments, Challenges and Advancements
• 2010 - “New policies create a new politics: issues of institutional design in climate change policy” Australian Journal of Agricultural and Resource Economics, April, Australian Journal of Agricultural and Resource Economics
• 2009 - ‘An Excess of Access’, Agenda: A Journal of Policy Analysis and Reform, vol 16, no 4, Agenda: A Journal of Policy Analysis and Reform
• 2009 - ‘Price Squeezes and Vertical Discrimination on Next Generation Access Networks’ (with Emma Lanigan and Eric Ralph), available at Price Squeezes and Vertical Discrimination on Next Generation Access Networks

External Appointments

• 2009 - Professor of Infrastructure Economics, SMART Infrastructure Facility, University of Wollongong
• 2009 - Senior Economic Adviser, Deloitte Australia
• 2005 - Member, Prime Minister’s Taskforce on Export and Infrastructure
• 2004 – Adjunct Professor, School of Economics, National University of Singapore
• 2004 – Member, Australian Centre of Regulatory Economics (ACORE) Advisory Board
• 2004 - Member, French Ordre National du Mérite
• 2002 – Editorial Board, The Review of Network Economics
• 2001 - Lay Member, New Zealand High Court
• 1999 - Chairman, Intellectual Property and Competition Review Committee, Attorney-General’s Department, Australia
• 1998 - Member, Commissione Scientifica, Telecom Italia, Rome, Italy
• 1997 - Member, Advisory Panel on Telecommunications Reform to the Minister for Communications and the Arts, Australia

Links

• Social Science Research Network (SSRN) Henry Ergas
• Henry Ergas' columns published in The Australian (newspaper)