The religious parties’ straightforward approach to dealing with economic problems can be seen in how they’re tackling Israel’s high, much of which stems from the so-called “monopolies” — politically well-connected corporations in dozens of sectors whose dominant market share allows them to control prices and discipline retailers and others who might break their hold on the marketplace.
To rein in these monopolies, past governments have tried to regulate their activities with everything from a competition authority to laws requiring disclosure of theirand profits. None of these attempts at simulating a competitive market worked, not least because Israel’s Supreme Court has sided with the monopolies by ruling, for example, that their excess profits could be justifiable as long as they weren’t “significantly” higher than competitive markets would produce.
The new coalition government isn’t taking on the monopolies by attempting to better regulate them. Instead, it is letting competitors take them on, by abolishing import restrictions and government hurdles that prevent newcomers and competing products from entering the marketplace.
calls for “the reduction of the centralization in the economy the reduction of the bureaucracy and the regulation for the business sector and the citizens, the streamlining of the public sector.”Article content Apart from curbing private monopolies’ government-granted powers, the government is abolishing its own monopolies. Last week it ended state-owned Israel Electric Corporation’s monopoly byto a private consortium, thus continuing the break-up of the electricity sector that Prime Minister Netanyahu began in 2018.