The Government finally killed the Grocery Choice website late last week. As regular readers know, I found it useless in intended function, distortionary and not at all supported by the ACCC’s grocery inquiry. This was unlike FuelWatch that had the potential to do good and was based on evidence from WA that it would at very least do no unintended harm. The Government’s child care choice information site still remains the model for what good can potentially be done with these sorts of activities.
The Government is set to press ahead with unit pricing or, as I have termed it, the repeal of the innumeracy tax. I think this is probably fine although not the top of the list of economic priorities.
Core Economics 
What evidence? The way I remember the debate, there was some econometric evidence presented by the ACCC that would have failed a first year data analysis course. The only (serious) econometric evidence I saw from Don Harding provided evidence to the contrary. Unless you can put something up yourself to counter Harding’s evidence I conclude that Fuelwatch was/is useless.
Do you normally advocate spending taxpayers money and establishing a new arm of bureacracy merely to do no unintended harm?
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GroceryChoice MK II would have been considerably more elaborate (and probably useful), as it supplied data at the individual supermarket level.
Probably why Coles and Woolies had it killed…
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PS re unit pricing. I have trouble focussing now in supermarkets. I spend a lot of time squinting at the per 100gm price.
Early days but…
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