In this paper we reflect on the challenge of reallocating water resources from agricultural interests to environmental uses. The area of interest is the Murray–Darling Basin, Australia, although the evidence presented provides salient lessons for a range of settings. We draw on the transaction...

In recent times the relative economic efficiency of urban water utilities has been neglected as policymakers sought to secure urban water supplies. This paper is an effort to measure the efficiency consequences of a number of recent urban water policy initiatives. Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA)...

The Australian National Water Initiative (NWI) builds on the foundations of earlier water reforms, attempts to correct earlier errors in both policy and its implementation, and seeks to better define some of the policy aims with the benefit of hindsight. However, despite the deliberate effort to...

Unlike other disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, economics has neglected leadership. This paper proposes that a distinctive leadership role is to facilitate the development of hope so that organizational members can sustain their commitments. The conceptual grounding for this...

Considerable public debate surrounded the Bush Administration's policy to invade Iraq if it did not dismantle its purported stockpile of 'Weapons of Mass Destruction' and the wisdom of Australian participation in such an attack. This paper invokes Albert Hirschman's well-known 'rhetoric of...

Although there has been a policy thrust towards making all Australians more cognisant of the relative scarcity of water resources, the approach adopted for urban dwellers differs markedly from that applied to irrigators. These differences are examined from a property-rights perspective focussing...