The construction of the Snowy Mountains Hydro-electric Scheme in the 1960s resulted in the diversion of 99% of the Snowy River's natural flow into the Murray and Murrumbidgee river systems. In 2000, the NSW, Victorian and Commonwealth governments agreed to restore between 21 per cent and 28 per...

‘Risk’ has become a central theme in 21st-century policy thinking. In particular, there has been considerable discussion of the ‘Great Risk Shift’, that is, the process by which the burden of risk has been shifted away from governments and employers and on to workers and households. The...

The Murray-Darling Basin faces increasing pressure on water quantity and quality. In 2006-07, salt interception schemes implemented as part of the Murray-Darling Basin Salinity Management strategy removed over 470,000 tonnes of salt from the water supply, reducing the salinity of water flowing...

The terms "grandfather clause" and "grandfathering" describe elements of a policy programme in which existing participants in an activity are protected from the impact of regulations, restrictions or charges applied to new entrants. In this paper, the role of grandfathering in the design of a...

The paper consists of a summary of the main sources of uncertainty about climate change, and a discussion of the major implications for economic analysis and the formulation of climate policy. Uncertainty typically implies that the optimal policy is more risk-averse than otherwise, and therefore...

Among the many environmental problems facing Australia, the problems of managing the Murray-Darling Basin and of responding to climate change are notable for their complexity, intractability and for the wide range of people and regions affected. Consideration of policy successes and failures in...

In this paper, we generalize the model of Quiggin and Chambers (2004) to allow for ambiguity, and derive conditions, referred to as generalized invariance, under which a two argument representation of preferences may be obtained independent of the existence of a unique probability measure. The...

In this chapter we argue that Australia’s labour market features too much unemployment, underemployment or associated forms of labour market insecurity. The later term implies a weak or tenuous connection to the labour force through underemployment or involuntary casual or part-time work...

In the past year, climate change has moved from political controversy to political consensus; at least, in relation for price-based policies the need to limit emissions. Uncertainties remain but with both major parties proposing to develop an emissions trading regime, it is timely to highlight...

We consider an asset market traded three types of assets: the risk–free asset, the market portfolio and derivatives written on the market portfolio return. We determine a sufficient condition to guarantee that noise risk monotonically changes their derivatives. The condition is that...