A common critique of most measures of income inequality, which are based on a single year's income, is that they fail to take account of income mobility. If income fluctuations are large, and individuals can smooth consumption, then high inequality and high mobility may be no worse than low...

Does faster economic growth increase pressure for democratic change, or reduce it? Using data for 154 countries for the period 1963-2007, we examine the short-run relationship between economic growth and moves toward and away from greater democracy. To address the potential endogeneity of...

From marginal relevance, the trade and business relations between Australia and Latin America have grown during the past two decades. A proximate reason is that they diversified to encompass a greater range of manufactures and services. Differences in the business environments of Australia and...

Australia is experiencing its largest mining boom for more than a century and a half. This paper explores, from a national perspective, important economic differences that arise when a mining boom, such as the current one, is generated by sustained export price increases (trading gains) rather...

This paper explores the distributional impact of commodity price shocks over the both the short and very long run. Using a GARCH model, we find that Australia experienced more volatility than many commodity exporting poor countries between 1865 and 2007. A single equation error correction model...

Macro-economic measurement goes back to the 17th century and became common practice in Western countries since the late-19th century. Since then, the growth and composition of some of the largest economies in Asia, particularly India and Japan, was also probed. And since the 1940s government...

Commodities have been central to structural change in the Australian economy with the 2000s expansion of mining seen as raising the spectre of the Dutch disease. If the assumption in the standard Heckscher-Olin trade model that labour and capital are not mobile between countries is relaxed, it...

This paper provides an overview of asylum migration from poor strife-prone countries to the OECD since the 1950s. I examine the political and economic factors in source countries that generate refugees and asylum seekers. Particular attention is given to the rising trend of asylum applications...

We present a general model of the interaction between settlement and the emergence of de facto property rights on frontiers prior to governments establishing and enforcing de jure property rights. Settlers have an incentive to establish de facto property rights to avoid the dissipation...