Impact of privatisation and broader reforms on the competitiveness of the cement manufacturing industry in Pakistan
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We investigate the level of competition in the Pakistani cement industry using a data sample spanning more than a quarter of a century, encompassing both the pre- and the post-reform period. The methodological constraints are addressed through the widely used Bresnahan¨CLau ¦Ë, Lerner index (LI), and Boone ¦Â tests alongside traditional competition indices, such as the Herfindahl index, concentration index, and price¨Ccost margins, to test consistent allegations of cartel formation and price and quantity supplied manipulations by the producers¡¯ association. We find that producers have in fact managed to maintain a stable share amongst themselves for a long period in terms of production capacities and assets, leading, in some cases, to excess capacities. The output level has been lower than would have been competitive. The output prices have surpassed the marginal cost consistently over a long period of time, and the industry has operated under conditions that are less than fully competitive. Broadly speaking, we conclude that, contrary to expectations, the level of competition in the industry has deteriorated since the reforms. The policy implication of our study is that a significant component of a future reform agenda should be the establishment and strengthening of regulatory institutions and the avoidance of regulatory capture to keep a consistent check on the working of ex-privatised firms to discourage anticompetitive practices. The nature of an industry such as the cement production industry, in which the environment is conducive to cartel formation, should be considered at the onset of the government¡¯s reform agenda in developing countries in particular, where institutions are relatively weak and less efficient and business lobbies are extremely powerful and politically connected.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".