Description:
This paper revisits the matter of attracting students to study economics, an issue that faces every Australian university economics department. While the Australian economy has been in a boom phase for some period it has not led to a relative increase in economic degree enrolments for local universities. While some of the Go8 universities have seen a steady increase in economics degree enrolments between 1995 and 2007, the national picture, taken over a longer period, reveals that economic degree enrolments as a percentage of the overall student population is still falling. The paper concludes with the shy hope that, apart from improvement to the syllabus and teaching methodologies, the marked economic slowdown might elicit an increase in student interest in economics. The paper closes by suggesting that now might be an appropriate time for the regimen of the ideal economics degree offered by Australian universities to be re-examined.
Description:
This article undertakes a census of how the Australian economics profession changed over the span of eleven years. It shows that the academic economics community has become more professionalised. It also explores which departments are expanding or contracting and whether there is any truth in the claim that the profession is becoming more Americanised.
Description:
This article undertakes a census of how the Australian economics profession changed over the span of eleven years. It shows that the academic economics community has become more professionalised. It also explores which departments are expanding or contracting and whether there is any truth in the claim that the profession is becoming more Americanised.
Description:
The Global Financial Crisis is likely to exert some impact upon the prevailing economic and political philosophy. The big question for economic and business instructors is to ponder whether it will lead to any significant changes in economic and business syllabus at Australian universities. The teaching of mainstream economics is durable and usually resistant to change. Yet the crisis has certainly caused rumblings in the teaching of first-year economics. There is certainly a great curiosity among the young about what went wrong. Moreover, they wish to know why neoliberalism has failed and why state intervention is resurgent. Young minds must be perplexed about the rapid revision of agenda from containing inflation in 2008 to coping with recession in 2009. This paper argues that an introductory course in the history of economic ideas could help tell them why.
Description:
The neoclassical model of transition from a centrally-administered socialist economic system to a market-based economic system was implemented in Russia and Eastern Europe. The neoclassical process took the form of either shock therapy or gradualism. However, each approach actually involved a combination of shock therapy and gradualist policies, making the distinction between the two approaches unfounded. In addition, both approaches suffered by the innate inadequacies of neoclassical economic analysis as being politically/institutionally naked. Both shock therapy supporters and gradualist neoclassical economists did not provide a specific process of institutional development, favouring a gradual market-driven institutional outcome. With regard to the political structure, democracy was inconsistent with shock therapy, while active state intervention during transition was inconsistent with the ultimate goal of the gradualist neoclassical economists of competitive capitalism.
Description:
This article revisits the Niemeyer mission to Australia in 1930 and shows how it facilitated the entry of local economists into the art of policy making. Until then the Scullin government had little regard for the worth of academic economists, a view shared by bankers and central bankers alike. With Niemeyer’s dogmatic advice considered too draconian by a vacillating government, Australian economists, led by L. F. Giblin and D. B. Copland, were galvanised into providing a more palatable alternative. This advice eventually transformed into the Premiers’ Plan which complemented the devaluation and wage cut, both of which had been implemented in January 1931. While the Plan in its entirety was deflationary it was a more equitable and imaginative blueprint than Niemeyer’s.
Description:
This article revisits the Niemeyer mission to Australia in 1930 and shows how it facilitated the entry of local economists into the art of policy making. Until then the Scullin government had little regard for the worth of academic economists, a view shared by bankers and central bankers alike. With Niemeyer’s dogmatic advice considered too draconian by a vacillating government, Australian economists, led by L. F. Giblin and D. B. Copland, were galvanised into providing a more palatable alternative. This advice eventually transformed into the Premiers’ Plan which complemented the devaluation and wage cut, both of which had been implemented in January 1931. While the Plan in its entirety was deflationary it was a more equitable and imaginative blueprint than Niemeyer’s.
Description:
The paper is motivated by a desire to find common ground between mainstream and post-Keynesian approaches to fiscal policy. A post-Keynesian approach with origins in Kalecki offers a promising line of enquiry which is developed here. The paper identifies the principal differences between the Keynesian and Kaleckian approaches. The possibilities are explored of finding accommodation between the mainstream and Kaleckian approaches to the taxation of greenhouse gases. The macroeconomic implications of taxing greenhouse gases are identified. However, these may be thwarted by the emergence of ›political aspects of innovation‹, akin to Kalecki’s ›political aspects of full employment‹. A Kaleckian balanced budget approach allied to fiscal incentives to innovate offers some prospect of common ground with the mainstream.
Description:
This paper empirically tests Levine's [1] endogenous growth model, which suggests that stock market and tax policy jointly affect economic growth. Following Levine [1], tax or impeding financial market activities have the potential to lower per capita growth rate. Using monthly data from 1980 to 2008, the relationship between tax revenue, stock market as proxies by direct tax revenue and KLCI respectively and economic growth in Malaysia is modeled using the Granger causality and VECM framework. Results support Levine's theory and reveal that over the sample period both tax revenue and stock market affect pattern of economic growth in Malaysia. These findings indicate that strong growth can be achieved through booming of stock market activities and the high revenue collection. Fiscal policy authorities in Malaysia will find these results useful.
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:
In the century preceding World War I, the world experienced a series of gold rushes. The wealth derived from these was distributed widely because of reduced migration costs and low barriers to entry. While gold mining itself was generally unprofitable for diggers and mine owners, the increase in the world's gold supply stimulated global trade and investment. In this introductory article we integrate the histories of migration, trade, colonisation, and environmental history to identify endogenous factors that increased the world's gold supply and generated sustained economic growth in the regions that were affected by gold rushes.
Description:
It was 1970. It was the Age of Aquarius. The Boeing 747 was introduced into intercontinental service. In Australia, the Federal Treasurer, Les Bury, began to notice that inflation and unemployment were rising simultaneously. And Australian students began studying economics using a localised adaptation of Samuelson's classic textbook.
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:
[1] The use of inverse one-dimensional (1-D) analytical methods for estimating vertical stream-aquifer exchange flux is now commonplace. However, the application of such simple models can lead to significant errors in estimates of vertical exchange flux where the model assumptions are violated in real systems. An idea that is gaining acceptance in the literature is that the presence of nonvertical flow is such a violation. However, it is shown here that nonvertical flow by itself will not necessarily lead to errors in vertical flux estimation but rather that significant errors can stem from nonuniform (convergent/divergent) flow fields and/or hydrodynamic dispersion even within uniform flow fields. Nonuniform flow may also be expected, in some cases, to create discrepancies between flux estimates made on the basis of vertical head gradient measurements and those made using 1-D analytical heat tracer methods. Significant differences are observed in the estimates of heat-derived fluxes obtained by the amplitude ratio and phase-shift time-series methods when convergent and divergent flows are apparent. Such differences may potentially be used to infer that convergent or divergent flow is occurring and that a 1-D analysis is inappropriate.
Description:
The article discusses the study which examines the impact of the adoption of genetically modified (GM) cotton on the global economy and on the developing countries. The standard GTAP (Global Trade Analysis Project) model of the global economy is used in the study to provide insights into the effects of governments allowing GM technology adoption in some countries without, and then with cotton trade and subsidy policy reform globally. The researchers conclude that developing country welfare could be enhanced more by allowing GM cotton adoption than by the removal of all cotton subsidies and tariffs. Furthermore, they believe that the study's results support the notion that the gains to developing countries from the Doha Cotton Initiative will be even greater if GM cotton is adopted first.
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:
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.