Ensuring the continued viability of rural and regional communities in Australia has become a high priority politically. Economic and environmental forces are perceived as threats to viability. Declining terms of trade for agricultural commodities along with decreased relative prices for...

Over the past 220 years since European settlement, Australia has amassed a diverse array of historic heritage places. Currently there are approximately 200,000 places listed on statutory heritage lists across the nation. Owing to the public-good nature of heritage, community values for the...

Resource management decisions influence not only the output of the economy but also the distribution of utility between groups within the community. The theory of Benefit Cost Analysis provides a means of incorporating this distributional change through the application of distributional or...

This report presents results of research designed to investigate variations in willingness to pay (WTP) estimates across different scales and scopes of environmental investments. The goal is to help catchment management authorities better prioritise their natural resource management actions at...

The survey was designed to estimate environmental values suitable for integration into MOSAIC, a bio-economic model for catchment and farm level planning. Local residents, as well as distant rural and distant urban communities, were surveyed in three NSW catchments (Lachlan, Namoi and...

Integrated catchment policies are widely used to manage natural resources in Australian catchments. Integration of environmental processes with socio-economic systems is often difficult due to the limitations of decision support tools. To support assessments of the environmental and economic...

Economic activity is inherently variable and monitoring it is a major challenge, especially in regional economies where resources are fewer and activity is more variable. Using a recent study of the Riverland region, the authors set out the information available, its limitations and means by...

Non-farm rural enterprises (NFRE) are increasingly studied because of their role in poverty reduction. However, existing studies of the effects of infrastructure on NFRE may give incorrect inferences because they typically fail to account for spatial effects. Such effects could reflect either...

In NSW the Water Management Act (2000) requires water to be specifically allocated for environmental purposes so as to improve river health. Water sharing plans have been developed that establish extractive and environmental shares to river flows. In unregulated river systems this has resulted...

Inclining block tariffs, where the unit price is dependent on the volume consumed, are widely used in urban water pricing. These tariffs attempt to satisfy both efficiency and equity goals by providing pricing signals to influence consumption decisions at the margin, whilst making...