Market Stewardship Actions for the NDIS

In response to growing concerns over the development of markets within the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS), key bodies such as the Productivity Commission and the Joint Standing Committee on the National Disability Insurance Scheme Public Inquiry have called for ‘market stewardship’.

Market stewardship broadly refers to efforts to address market deficiencies, such as thin markets, market gaps or other market failures, and is also known as market shaping.

While the need for market stewardship is widely recognised, in the scheme design it is clearly envisioned that the National Disability Insurance Agency (NDIA) will only intervene when it can be demonstrated that market failure has occurred.

This poses difficult questions about how the NDIA can detect market deficiencies and what strategies it can use to address them. It also means the NDIA must attempt market stewardship before commissioning services to address market gaps.

In this report, researchers from the Centre for Social Impact UNSW draw together the international literature on effective quasi-market interventions for managing market failures and gaps.