A land retirement policy whereby land is taken out of agriculture and converted to natural vegetation or forestry has the potential to reduce environmental damage related to dryland salinity in Western Australia. This paper uses some recent results in the theory of directional distance functions...

The terms "grandfather clause" and "grandfathering" describe elements of a policy programme in which existing participants in an activity are protected from the impact of regulations, restrictions or charges applied to new entrants. In this paper, the role of grandfathering in the design of a...

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...

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...

Quiggin and Chambers have introduced the notion of invariant preferences, and shown that the only invariant expected-utility functionals are those associated with a quadratic utility function. This note identifies the class of preferences which simultaneously satisfy invariance, two-fund...