The conference series is a joint venture between the Economic Research Centre at the University of Western Australia and the Centre for Economic Policy Research at the Australian National University. The 2003 Conference, the sixteenth in this series, was held at UWA in Perth from 5-7 November.

As an empirical regularity for broad commodity groups, we show that price elasticities of demand are scattered around the value of minus one-half. We also show that this finding is not inconsistent with the utility-maximising theory of the consumer under the conditions of preference...

Growth in the world economy is not shared equally among all countries, with some growing faster, some slower and some not at all. The cross-country distribution of growth is a useful tool for analysing the inequality of growth. The appropriately-weighted first moment of this distribution is...

(1) The paper uses the substitutability between goods to model the transmission to other products of a consumption shock to one product. The framework is used to analyse the impact on drinking of legalisation of marijuana. For all types of consumers for example, the results indicate that...

The Millennium Boom of 2003–2011 made the resources industry hugely profitable and led to a surge in new projects around the world. This had major implications for the Australian economy: resource investment accounted for almost half of all business investment at the peak, the capitalisation...

The stochastic approach is a new way of viewing index numbers in which uncertainty and statistical ideas play a central role. Rather than just providing a single number for the rate of inflation, the stochastic approach provides the whole probability distribution of inflation. This paper...

This paper introduces a simulation procedure in the context of a demand system for vice -- marijuana, tobacco and alcohol -- to formally account for the inherent uncertainty in marijuanarelated data and parameters. This entails using existing econometric estimates pertaining to the consumption...

In many markets unit prices decline as the quantity purchased rises, a phenomenon which can be considered to be part of the economics of packaging. For example, in Australia marijuana costs as much as 80 percent less if purchased in the form of ounces rather than grams. This paper reviews the...