(ii) I am very much anti the stabiliser idea....it is economically playing with fire. Before you shout me down, I have had to pick up the wreckage in developing markets where such systems have been used, for example in French societies.....and also Belgium. Let me explain.
It is a widely used mechanism in the fuel market and social fuels such as LPG (aka genrically as 'Calor Gas' in the UK). It works well at first but what happens if there is the inevitable rise of base prices. At some point the government should intervene to lift the base price but doesn't - because it can (more likely is) a major election votes hot potato. So prices are held back and there is a drain on treasury and Government is forced to tax through the back door to pay the delta in the artificial price and the world market.
With the margins often negative in the market place, the marketing goes, service disapperars, salesforce goes and eventually safety is even compromised. For example, I had a consultancy team working on LPG in Morocco (5th largest market in the world), combined with Tunisia. This had happened and indeed I even found that my company's operations had 400 Bedouins seriously burnt and even killed - and not reported. Why, the valves had been compromised in using a parallel screw thread rather than a spiral thread swo as to be cheaper; they were not using the stenching agent (Mercaptan) that gets added to the LPG and Nat Gas as they are naturally odourless - and a whole host of cylinder maintenance issues and state.
We broke the stranglehold by commissioning market research to show that these issues were a potential election bomb with the electorate as they feared a major accident was in the making (and a cylinder going off in a house is not a pretty sight). In return for putting some air into the market, we committed to driving in a high action safety recovery programme and would drag the others along too (we had support from the other majo