As part of the Better Regulation reform program, we have published an Expenditure Forecast Assessment Guideline (Guideline). The Guideline specifies the information we require to assess expenditure. In order to collect the information specified in the Guideline, the AER has undertaken development of Regulatory Information Notices (RINs).
We issued final RINs for economic benchmarking data requirements on 28 November 2013. Economic benchmarking techniques refer to methods that employ economic theory on the behaviour of firms in order to estimate relative efficiency and how this changes over time. The methods also provide a framework for decomposing the various types of efficiency affecting network service providers (NSPs).
The economic benchmarking RINs have been developed in consultation with stakeholders. This consultation included a series of workshops, bilateral meetings and submissions on the data templates and draft RINs. The AER has also developed RINs to collect data for category analysis benchmarking.