Notes to Submission to the Productivity Commission Inquiry into the ...

‘perfect’, it is important at least to create efficient access – i.e. at least up to the pointwhere the marginal cost of not creating access equates with the marginal cost ofproviding access 12 .Associate ExternalitiesPeople associated with people with impairments (colleagues, family and servicepersonnel such as retailers) sometimes assist with transport, communication, shoppingand daily management activities because of the lack of accessible design features in thebasic social infrastructure. In economic term, such assistance is a substitution of labourfor capital. In general, the technology of capital to labour relationship that is adopted in aparticular state depends on the cost of labour and the cost of capital so that where the costof labour is low, the efficient technology will be more labour intensive than where it ishigh.For people who assist only occasionally, the assistance is generally trivial, uncommonand insignificant. For people who offer more regular assistance, the additional help mayinvolve time helping with transport/shopping, reading a book to a person withsight/hearing impairment, etc. For family and close friends, the help may be extensiveand may be full-time. In any case, the economic issue is that the time is generally unpaidand therefore the market signal in the market is of a zero of the opportunity cost of theassistance. This necessarily results in a technology bias against accessible design andtowards unpaid labour, and therefore an inefficient excess use of such labour and aninefficient inadequate use of accommodative designs.While the wage rate is usually the measure of the opportunity cost of time, complexitiesarise because of emotional motivational issues involved in ‘assistance”. The emotionalelements can’t be ignored since they influence the signal put to the market, and thereforeimpact on the nature of the adopted design technology. Where the associate enjoysassisting, the time spent assisting is a benefit rather than an opportunity cost, unless theperson being assisted resents the sense of objectification implied by this. Where theassociate assists in the normal sense of social intercourse, or social trade, it would not belegitimate to consider the time spent assisting as an opportunity cost since such time is afreely chosen leisure or commercial activity. Only when assistance is out of a sense ofduty or guilt is it appropriate to measure time assisting at the wage rate, for only thenwould the associate prefer undertaking some other activity.Clearly, it is impossible to know what motivates the assistant or how the person beingassisted feels about being assisted. This makes accurate estimation of the time cost ofassistance impossible. Traditionally where the time saving from a project has ambiguities12 This is not the place to discuss the complexities involved in measuring the opportunity cost of time. Itsuffices to point out that it is the time spent that would not be spent if the person did not have the disability.Such counterfactual modeling is complex, as can be illustrated by estimating the opportunity cost ofwaiting for a taxi because of the inadequate design of a taxi booking service. The time lost waiting needsto be balanced against the time gained in using a taxi instead of a train, and this in turn would need toaccount for the resource costs and amenity gains or losses of using a taxi relative to a train or car.19