In project appraisal of infrastructure projects, cost benefit analysis has an important role. One of the central concerns is to adjust the distortions in markets to provide a better guide to a more effective allocation of scarce resources. The objectives of this thesis are : to establish the lack of a comprehensive estimation of the shadow wage rate (SWR) in most project appraisals in the Australian context; to develop a model for the estimation of the SWR for groups of occupations; to estimate the SWRs for the major groups of occupations in Australia; to forecast the number of employees required for Sydney's second airport project and to apply the estimated SWRs to the project, followed by estimation of the total social cost of the project. The latter estimation is done using a novel approach which, unlike many previous studies of transport infrastructure projects, estimates the SWR entirely from published statistical sources. Overall, the results are significant not only in the context of Sydney's second airport, but for other airports, the transportation sector, and in general for Australian project appraisal. The study proposes the need to change the traditional approach to the treatment of labour costs in project appraisal in Australia and provides a framework which can be useful to other researchers and analysts who wish to examine the pricing of labour in Australian project appraisal. / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/235646 |
| Date | January 1997 |
| Creators | Saleh, Iraj, University of Western Sydney, Macarthur, Faculty of Business and Technology, Department of Economics and Finance |
| Source Sets | Australiasian Digital Theses Program |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Source | THESIS_FBT_EFI_Saleh_I.xml |
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