STATE-CREATED MONOPOLIES

Wairarapa Times-Age, 25 June 1941, Page 6

STATE-CREATED MONOPOLIES

TENDENCIES IN WARTIME. Tendencies seen by the “Financial News” in the wartime concentration of British industry are already revealing I themselves under New Zealand's Industrial Efficiency Act. Of the British development, the "Financial News" says: —The result of present trends may well be to establish forms of organisation in the affected industries far removed from the public interest. Such organisations, indeed, are likely to concern themselves largely with price maintenance (i.e.. restriction of production), the prevention of entry of newcomers to the trade (particularly if there are Government provisions, for some time after the war. preventing new firms from entering those trades), the regulation of trade practices, and so on. There will bo serious danger of extreme ossification of the industrial structure, lack of enterprise and initiative, a general tendency to restrict, production in order to maintain the level of profit per unit of production. This danger which confronts our industrial structure is real; our major post-war industrial problem will be to devise forms of governmental control to prevent this corporative and fundamentally backward system from developing.