Australia is the world's driest continent and the intensity of conflict over water and water management has been increasing , especially in rural areas. By focussing on the recent federalist compact, National Wa ter Initiative (NWI), we explore the use of market and property rights instruments...

This chapter argues that Australia’s labour market – indeed most capitalist labour markets – feature too much unemployment and underemployment and associated forms of labour market insecurity or disadvantage. The later term implies a weak or tenuous connection to the labour force through...

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...

The pattern of boom and bust that characterised the Australian economy from the early 1970s to the early 1990s currently seem to be a thing of the past as Australia enters its sixteenth year of uninterrupted expansion. The expansion has lasted twice as long as those of the 1970s and 1980s, which...

This paper has two goals. First, we demonstrate that standard arguments and methods from production and duality analysis can be used to provide a comprehensive and general treatment of the value of information for a risk-averse firm with expected-utility (linear-in-probabilities) preferences and...

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 formulate a dynamic framework for an individual decision-maker within which discovery of previously unconsidered propositions is possible. Using a standard game-theoretic representation of the state space as a tree structure generated by the actions of agents (including acts of nature), we...

In this paper we show that, if demand varies stochastically, and firms compete after the realization of demand shocks, the strategy space may be inferred from market evidence. The key idea is that, in equilibrium, each firm acts as a monopolist, choosing the optimal price-quantity combination...

In this paper we consider the problem of accommodating indigenous cultural heritage values in resource assessment and valuation. We suggest a need for price-based approaches to valuation to be replaced by or complemented with quantitative constraints, reflecting the requirement that rights...

We present a definition of increasing uncertainty, in which an elementary increase in the uncertainty of any act corresponds to the addition of an `elementary bet' that increases consumption by a fixed amount in (relatively) `good' states and decreases consumption by a fixed (and possibly...