The discounting of future benefits has long been one of the most controversial, and in many ways, unsatisfactory, aspects of benefit -cost analysis. This concern has been heightened by the rise of the environmental movement and, particularly by the debate over sustainable development. The...

Off-farm employment has become increasingly important as an aspect of resource adjustment and a source of income in Australian agriculture. However, it is surprising that there is a paucity of work on this topic reported in the agricultural economics literature. Therefore, we have drawn upon...

Large scale forest plantations in the Murray-Darling Basin may be embraced as a carbon sequestration mechanism under a Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme. However, increased tree plantation will be associated with reduced inflows to river systems because of increased transpiration, interception...

Almost all aspects of the current policy debate over grain handling, transport and marketing turn on the problem of monopoly. The essential problem is that, in the presence of extensive scale economies, the perfectly competitive market of the textbooks cannot be sustained. Policy makers are left...

It is shown that parameter estimates in a regression with a logarithmic time trend are not invariant to the choice of the starting point of that time trend. Possible solutions to this problem are discussed and applied to data from a recent article in this Review where a logarithmic time trend...

The problem of salinity and proposals to control or ameliorate it have received increasing attention in Australia in recent years. It is generally agreed that inappropriate land and water management practices, such as the excessive use of irrigation water in hydrologically unsuitable areas, are...

Agricultural producers typically are faced with risk about the yields they will experience and the prices they will receive. Stabilisation schemes can spread risk and thereby reduce the risk faced by individual producers. The risk-reducing capacity of a scheme and the cost of risk reduction...