During the negotiations on the Australia–US free trade agreement (AUSFTA), the US dairy industry vigorously opposed opening the US market to imports of Australian dairy products on the grounds that the US industry would be devastated. Subsequently, the agreement signed in February 2004 made an...

Deregulation of the Australian dairy industry, specifically the removal of price subsidies to ‘market milk’, as well as ongoing drought in many dairy regions, has placed considerable pressure on farm cash income and a search for ways in which dairy farms can be made to operate more...

Land managers in upper catchments are being asked to make expensive changes in land use, such as by planting trees, to attain environmental service targets, including reduced salt loads in rivers, to meet needs of downstream towns, farms and natural habitats. End-of-valley targets for salt loads...

The level and nature of competition in supermarket retailing in Australia has been hotly debated as a policy issue in recent times. The creeping acquisitions of smaller groups by Coles and Woolworths have led to several investigations amid claims that consumers will be disadvantaged by the...

Management of the Murray–Darling river system involves a large number of users with imprecisely defined rights, and an aggregate rate of resource use that is environmentally unsustainable. One possible policy response is to make formal or informal contracts with users, under which users...

We argue that to support agriculture–environmental policy decision making, stakeholders need ‘quantitative back-of-the-envelope’ analysis that is timely and sufficiently accurate to make informed decisions. We apply this concept to the analysis of the supply of ecosystem services from...

A key feature of water policy reform in Australia has been the separation of water access entitlements from land titles and the establishment of markets for water. However, the separation of water entitlements from land failed to account for a number of characteristics that were implicit in the...

This article discusses whether at a theoretical level the large and growing role of the vertically integrated supermarket chains raises a buyer-power concern because of potential harm to other retailers, suppliers, and/or consumers. Even if this is possible, whether it is a real concern depends...

Although there has been a policy thrust towards making all Australians more cognisant of the relative scarcity of water resources, the approach adopted for urban dwellers differs markedly from that applied to irrigators. These differences are examined from a property-rights perspective focussing...