astro
August 7, 2011, 1:51am
1
Per this story it references the displeasure of Israeli citizens with high prices many say are due to cartels but the article does not identify the cartels.
What cartels are these? How do they operate?
Netanyahu planned to name a cabinet-level team on Sunday to address demands by the demonstrators, who in under a month have swollen from a cluster of student tent-squatters into a diffuse, countrywide mobilization of Israel’s burdened middle class.
Israel projects growth of 4.8 percent this year at a time of economic stagnation in many Western countries, and has relatively low unemployment of 5.7 percent. But business cartels and wage disparities have kept many citizens from feeling the benefit.
This sort of answers your question. I cannot help with more specifics but perhaps it gives a clue.
But, on the other hand, YES, the widespread sense of anger and grievance against Big Business and the government that can’t or won’t bring it to heel is very, very real. The gruesome statistics are all over the Web, and they paint a painfully clear picture. There’s almost nothing that the average Israeli can buy in the store that doesn’t cost him more then it would cost his counterpart in Europe and the US. In many industries, despite the privatization of the recent years, there’s almost no real competition. Two or three companies divvy up the market, fixing the price and bilking the customer. The former state monopolies became part of huge cartels, bringing the concentration of economic power in the Israeli economy to an enormously high level and suffocating the free market.
SOURCE: Understanding the Israeli Economic Crisis, And the Opportunity
There have been recent articles about import taxes or restrictions as well as antitrust exemptions for the dairy market .
Here’s a copy of an article from the Wall Street Journal:
This spring's Arab revolts were ignited by rapidly rising food prices, but they soon mutated into political rebellions protesting decades of brutal oppression. Similarly, rising food prices in Israel have led to widespread protests this summer—dubbed...
In April 2010, the Bank of Israel’s annual report on the economy included a study showing that “some 20 business groups, nearly all of a family nature and structured in a pronounced pyramid form, continue to control a large proportion of public firms (some 25% of firms listed for trading) and about half of market share.” Despite Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s efforts to introduce free-market reforms, not much has improved over the past year. From diapers to cars, the Israeli consumer is at the mercy of local manufacturers and government-certified importers, monopolies and cartels that inflate prices by 100% and more. . . .
At the same time, bureaucracy and costly regulations stymie entrepreneurship and inhibit economic growth. Government owns 93% of all land in Israel and the inflated prices it charges, plus its maze of regulations and codes, raise construction costs to prohibitive levels.
Misallocation of credit by banks and other financial institutions has been inhibiting growth as well. Despite then-Finance Minister Netanyahu’s financial-market reforms that broke Israel’s bank duopoly in 2005, a tiny fraction of the population still uses a third of all credit, which they leverage into highly risky investments, mostly in foreign real estate. Small and medium-size businesses, the most productive enterprises in the economy, are credit-starved, as are the outlying areas of the Galilee and the Negev.