Description:
Grouping regional towns and cities in Australia according to economic functions could improve understanding of the importance of economic factors in determining growth. Several researchers have used clustering techniques to examine the growth and characteristics of regional cities in Australia. The current study extends clustering methodologies by adopting an optimisation approach based on a clustering technique using the k-means algorithm to investigate the impact of socio-economic factors on population growth and decline in regional Australia. The analysis in the paper suggests that industry of employment, individual weekly income, age group and education level have an important impact on population change. These findings have policy implications for economic planning of regional areas in Australia.
Description:
On a March evening in 1973 the ABC television compere of the Monday Conference programme, Robert Moore introduced his guest, Paul Samuelson, by holding aloft a copy of his economics textbook. Moore joked that Samuelson had taught more people economics than anyone else. He was also, of course, an eminent economist with major contributions in public finance, international economics and the dissemination of Keynesian economics. This paper will discuss how the Australian adaption of Paul Samuelson's Economics came about. Extensively adapted to fit Australian conditions, the two Australian authors, Keith Hancock and Bob Wallace, both at Flinders University, came up with a publishing success that was to take Australian university economics instruction by storm. They were not, however, Samuelson's first choice as adaptors. A whole generation of Australian students was brought up on Samuelson. It was also the first attempt at adapting an overseas text to suit Australian institutions and conventions. The paper assesses how well it was received and how it spawned imitators.
Description:
While prospecting by junior mining companies (JMCs) is a vital contributor to modern wealth creation, attributes of the junior mining sector (JMS) limit JMC-fund raisings to external equity (shares). In considering responses by JMC principals to deep discounting and other JMC-investor strategies, potential responses were found to: increase returns to principals, increase JMS moral-hazard issues, and further deepen price discounts on JMC share offerings, especially IPOs. It is suggested that the attractiveness and moral-hazard consequences of these potential responses can be greatly diminished if mining-tenement fees are raised and JMC prospecting costs are allowed as an offset against those fees
Description:
A key departure in this study from many earlier studies is that, on the continuum of financial stress from nil to very high, both very high levels of stress and very low levels are seen as being harmful and potential harbinger of a financial-market crisis. Specifically, a surfeit of stress can act as a tipping point into crisis and a dearth of stress can encourage hubris and increase a nation’s susceptibility to financial contagion from another nation; even one that is far removed by geographic and/or economic distance. This paper focuses on developing financial stress indices for the US and Australia using composite market indices, trade weight indices and yields on securities with different maturity dates. Monthly data from January 1989 to December 2011 was sourced from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA), the Federal Reserve Bank (FRB), the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA), the Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis website, Bank of Canada, Reserve Bank of New Zealand and Yahoo finance website. For purposes of this study the aggregate measures of stress consists of inverted yield spreads, volatility measures for market indices, volatility measures of trade weighted indexes, risk spreads, credit risk spreads and a measures of risk in the equity market.
Description:
Sixteen supply-side and seven demand-side export promoting policies were simulated and examined for export and associated employment impacts. Policy design considered the spatial distributions of export promoting and constraining variables defined within the Tiberi-Vipraio Hodgkinson (TVH) regional innovation context typology (2000), and examined movements in their value-added industry support export enhancing information multipliers. These were derived using innovation indicator matrices (IIMs) within an extended input-output framework as designed by the author. The information sector was derived using a modified decomposition and aggregation (Jussawalla et al., 1988) whilst IIMs build upon DeBresson's (1999) innovative interactive matrices to show innovation strategy information spillover contributions rather than innovation inputs and outputs as an intermediate transactions quadrant subset. Policy simulations showed that information sharing consistent with the innovative milieu theory best stimulated exports and associated employment. That is, assistance to promote related scientific research delivered the best export, associated employment outcomes and related flow-on effects.
Description:
OBJECTIVE: Ecological models have been applied to investigate multiple domains influencing physical activity behaviour, including individual, social, organisational, community, environmental and policy factors. With regard to the built environment, research to date has been limited to small geographical areas and/or small samples of participants. This study examined the geographical association between provision of sport facilities and participation in sport across an entire Australian state, using objective total enumerations of both, for a group of sports, with adjustment for the effect of socioeconomic status (SES). METHODS: De-identified membership registration data were obtained from state sport governing bodies of four popular team sports. Associations between participation rate, facility provision rate and SES were investigated using correlation and regression methods. RESULTS: Participation rate was positively associated with provision of facilities, although this was complicated by SES and region effects. The non-metropolitan region generally had higher participation rates and better provision of facilities than the metropolitan region. CONCLUSIONS: Better provision of sports facilities is generally associated with increased sport participation, but SES and region are also contributing factors. Implications for public health: Community-level analysis of the population, sport participation and provision of facilities should be used to inform decisions of investments in sports facilities.
Description:
OBJECTIVE: Ecological models have been applied to investigate multiple domains influencing physical activity behaviour, including individual, social, organisational, community, environmental and policy factors. With regard to the built environment, research to date has been limited to small geographical areas and/or small samples of participants. This study examined the geographical association between provision of sport facilities and participation in sport across an entire Australian state, using objective total enumerations of both, for a group of sports, with adjustment for the effect of socioeconomic status (SES). METHODS: De-identified membership registration data were obtained from state sport governing bodies of four popular team sports. Associations between participation rate, facility provision rate and SES were investigated using correlation and regression methods. RESULTS: Participation rate was positively associated with provision of facilities, although this was complicated by SES and region effects. The non-metropolitan region generally had higher participation rates and better provision of facilities than the metropolitan region. CONCLUSIONS: Better provision of sports facilities is generally associated with increased sport participation, but SES and region are also contributing factors. Implications for public health: Community-level analysis of the population, sport participation and provision of facilities should be used to inform decisions of investments in sports facilities.
Description:
John Vaizey is almost a forgotten figure in modern British history and even more in the fields of political economy and economics where he first made his mark. His work is now rarely cited and, even in political histories of the Thatcher decade, or the travails of the Labour governments before then, his name rarely reappears. However Vaizey's pioneering work on the economics of education is beginning to be recognised and indeed followed. This paper reassesses his life, especially the last decade of his life when Vaizey, basked in the limelight, enjoyed some of the glittering prizes. It was a decade when Vaizey took some major ideological turns, one the most controversial being his decision to leave the Labour party after 30 years of membership. The paper revisits the reasons why Vaizey renounced democratic socialism, Keynesianism and, along with that, the beguiling promises of social science. It reflected his peculiar interest in political failure along with disillusionment in democratic socialism. The switch meant that this Cambridge-trained economist, tutored by Joan Robinson, had to convert, albeit reluctantly, to monetarism and ditch the post-war Keynesian consensus.
Description:
The Great Depression is famous for enticing a whole generation of young men and women into studying economics especially in Britain and America and even in this country. What then of the great financial turbulence caused by the subprime crisis? Did it provoke an increase in student interest in economics? Or perhaps the relatively milder traverse Australia has enjoyed over the past three years has meant that student interest was not ignited by what was happening overseas. This paper scrutinises the latest enrolment data for Australia and the other Anglophone countries to ascertain whether there has been any marked increase in economics degree enrolments. [Author abstract]
Description:
The recognition that corporate social responsibility (CSR) is important for business sustainability has focused the bulk of research on explicit normative arguments for its adoption by large corporations. This ignores the role of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and the investigation of how such firms actually perform CSR activities. This study begins with the premise that SMEs may design appropriate CSR strategies to address issues in local communities. SMEs operate within these communities and subsequently are more aware of community and environmental issues than their larger counterparts. From this emerges the aim of examining the reality of this proposition from the particular perspective of a regional city in Australia. The results show a gap between normative CSR proposals and the actual operation of CSR processes in this cohort of SMEs in a regional community. What is exposed is the complexity of CSR ‘on the ground at the business frontline’.
Description:
The recognition that corporate social responsibility (CSR) is important for business sustainability has focused the bulk of research on explicit normative arguments for its adoption by large corporations. This ignores the role of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and the investigation of how such firms actually perform CSR activities. This study begins with the premise that SMEs may design appropriate CSR strategies to address issues in local communities. SMEs operate within these communities and subsequently are more aware of community and environmental issues than their larger counterparts. From this emerges the aim of examining the reality of this proposition from the particular perspective of a regional city in Australia. The results show a gap between normative CSR proposals and the actual operation of CSR processes in this cohort of SMEs in a regional community. What is exposed is the complexity of CSR ‘on the ground at the business frontline’.
Description:
This paper examines the empirical outcomes of the policies of nine monetary authorities (eight OECD nations and the Euro zone) so as to infer the strength and stability of the economic relationships behind those policies. Governments, responding to earlier rampant inflation, have in recent decades avowed to pursue monetary policies to maintain inflation at a low stable rate. In recent decades, the relationship between inflation and money supply, that is postulated in the received wisdom and confirmed by decades of observation, appears to be breaking down. In examining possible causes of this instability, this paper sees on-going changes in the velocity-of-money to be less plausible than shifting dominance in world currencies or the creative destruction of technological progress. This paper suggests the relative monetary stability of recent decades may be less achievable in the future.
Description:
Focus is on agricultural production of a river basin economy and ecosystem processes relating to climate change and water supply. A generic regulated river basin model of agricultural production is integrated with an existing demand-based macroeconomic model in discrete time which has been developed previously over a series of computer simulation experiments. This is the forerunner to a fully-specified Murray-Darling Basin model. Two crops are in the model - rainfed wheat and irrigated rice - with River Basin Commission revenue and expenditure, as well as exports and imports outside the river basin economy. The model simulates 100 years of production.
Description:
•Wealth effect of Chinese PE announcements can be seen on application, approval, and completion.•No significant price response on announcements of withdrawal or rejection of applications.•Market discount, proceeds from private placements, and private-institutional buying systematically influence market reaction.•Influence of announcement effect differs across changes in ownership of investor categories.•Results are consistent with the information and ownership structure hypotheses. In response to the China Securities Regulatory Commission's regulation of private equity placements (PEP) in 2006, this study investigates the impact of the announcements of PEP applications, withdrawals, rejections, approvals, and completions on the returns of the firms that issue private equity (PE) and the factors that influence market reactions to these announcements. The results show that issuing firms experience stock price responses only to the announcements of PE applications, approvals, and completions. The announcement effect is positively related to the market discount, proceeds from private placements, and private institutional buying and ownership changes; and negatively related to government or government institutional buying and changes in the ownership of management buyers.
Description:
Innovation has become a widely used, but ill-defined, everyday term in the 21st century. Firms are urged to be innovative to gain or sustain a ‘competitive edge’; consultants advertise their strategic advice as the essence of innovation; the survival of local organisations depends on the capacity building that comes from innovation; schools are exalted to have innovation in their curriculum; and universities promote themselves as leaders in innovation. Likewise, the term entrepreneur, used to describe the human agency behind innovation, is equally ill-defined in everyday use. Entrepreneurs’ value to society varies widely from positive to negative depending on the emphasis of journalists, academics, businesspersons, unionists, right-wing think tanks and left-wing activists. Such imprecise definition is, however, undesirable in academic discourse and the focus of this paper is the shifting role of the innovative entrepreneur in economic theory and some of the reasons for this dynamic. In this paper, innovation economics is defined as a body of economic theory that contends a priori that economic development is the result of appropriated knowledge, innovation and entrepreneurship operating within an institutional environment of systems of innovation. This distinguishes innovation economics from other branches of economics, including mainstream neoclassical theory, which views capital accumulation as the primary driver of economic development, chiefly in the form of economic growth. In the innovation economics paradigm, the socio-economic world functions as an open and complex system, exhibiting tendencies to adaptation. This isin contrast to neoclassical economics that regards the economy as a closed system exhibiting tendencies to mechanical equilibrium. A history of economic thought perspective is adopted in this paper to first trace out the rise of the innovative entrepreneur in early theories of political economy, to in effect create a nascent innovation economics. Then, the disappearance of innovation economics is facilitated by the infanticide of the innovative entrepreneur at the hands of neoclassical theory. In the first half of the 20th century, the history of economic thought marked the resurrection of the entrepreneur as an innovating agent by Joseph Schumpeter and then the nurturing of this agent in economic theory by Micha