Government agencies produce indexes that purport to measure international competitiveness. The most common version is the real effective exchange rate, which is some form of weighted average of the real exchange rates of the country's trading partners. Such indexes convey a false sense of...

The stochastic approach to index numbers has been successfully applied to the estimation of inflation, the world interest rate and international competitiveness. One distinct advantage of this approach is that it provides the whole distribution of the index, not simply one value. In this...

This article introduces a new tool for measuring relative pay within organizations. We call this innovation the 'Pay Parity (PP) matrix', and discuss its advantages and useful properties. The PP matrix allows us to conveniently measure, and draw inferences about, the nature of the whole...

This article introduces a new tool for measuring relative pay within organizations. We call this innovation the ‘Pay Parity (PP) matrix’, and discuss its advantages and useful properties. The PP matrix allows us to conveniently measure, and draw inferences about, the nature of the whole...

This article analyses differences in the wealth of nations by comparing PPP-based cross-country incomes from the Penn World Table with those derived from prevailing exchange rates. Using the Balassa (1964)-Samuelson (1964) productivity-bias framework, we introduce the 'international poverty...

The paper provides an account of aspects of exchange-rate economics that are of particular relevance to the resources sector. The issues discussed include exchange-rate volatility and the risk management practices used to deal with it, the role of productivity differences across countries, and...

Australian universities have in recent times been undergoing a substantial transformation in the way in which they are managed. They have moved away from the (British-based) traditional collegiate model to one in which professional managers play a centre-stage role. This paper investigates an...

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.