Anna Wilson

Anna is an economist at Frontier Economics, specialising in regulatory and policy reform in the water and transport sectors. She has over 20 years of experience working for companies, regulators and policy makers on a range of issues.

She has significant experience assessing and developing structural regulatory reforms and pricing regimes to enable greater competition and private sector participation. Anna also applies economic theory and quantitative techniques to analyse various policy issues including how to improve the way roads are funded and used, or how to most effectively improve waterway health.

Anna has worked at Frontier Economics in both Australia and Europe, giving her clients access to international experience and enables the insights and lessons learned from other sectors to inform her clients’ strategies. She has also held senior roles at the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) in the transport and water market branches.

Her key areas of expertise are listed below.

Policy advice

Anna has helped government departments to apply an economics lens to complex policy issues. Notably, she had a lead role in developing Australia's water market rules. More generally she has worked with governments to identify market failures, develop regulatory remedies and design, implement and evaluate policy using robust data and economic analysis.

Examples include:

• Providing advice to numerous governments on reforms to enable road user charges.
• Evaluating and analysing road and rail safety policies and trials.
• Developing reforms to regulation and planning policies to better manage stormwater flow.
• Exploring options for enabling competition within freight and transport supply chain including at intermodal terminals and in the context of mobility as a service.
• Analysis of whether and how to enable and regulate autonomous technology such as autonomous vehicles and autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) for providing last mile delivery services.

Economic Regulation

Anna has supported regulated businesses to prepare pricing proposals to economic regulators, and regulators in evaluating these proposals. This has included advice on regulatory strategy, operating and capital expenditure forecasts, cost efficiency strategies, incentive scheme design. She also has expertise in developing and designing regulatory framework particularly in transport and water sector.

Examples include:

• Supporting water businesses (such as Melbourne Water) to prepare and prepare price submissions to regulators.
• Assisting the Malaysian Aviation (MAVCOM) regulator to develop their economic regulatory framework applying to Malaysian Airports.
• Undertaking reviews for regulators on measures to enhance and restructure their economic regulatory frameworks in the face of significant changes to the sector such as reforms the taxi regulation with the emergence of Uber and other ride sharing providers.

Regulatory impact statements and cost benefit analysis

Anna regularly works with State and Federal Governments to prepare regulatory impact statements and supporting cost benefit analysis. This requires a clear economic framework which she has applied to assess a wide range of topics including reforms to:

• The Heavy Vehicle National Law on behalf of the National Transport Commission
• Driver licensing schemes for the Austroads and State departments of transport
• Heavy vehicle mass limit to enable low and zero emission trucks
• Speed limits
• Construction sector policies
• Water Management Regulation

Anna also has extensive experience in leading, authoring and reviewing cost-benefit analyses for a range of infrastructure projects including for Melbourne Water in relation to the development of city-wide recycled water networks and for the Victorian Auditor General (VAGO) in relation to recent major rail projects in the State.

We work as one team across the world

In Asia-Pacific, we do this from offices in Australia and Singapore. We work as a single team with expertise and people brought together as required by the problem we are solving for our clients.  Reach out to any of our economists and consultants to find out how we can help you.