Non market valuation and bio economic modelling are combined in a dynamic model of ecosystem services. A mathematical proof demonstrates that the imputed price of natural capital contains all non market values and that scarcity rent is the total value of ecosystem services. A dynamic demand...

The agricultural sector is a central part of the Fiji Islands economy. Policies to alleviate poverty and stimulate economic growth need to be based on a sound understanding of the local agricultural systems involved. This understanding needs to extend to the responsiveness of production to price...

Cooking oil is known as an essential commodity in Indonesia. Having such an important role, the Indonesian government often interfered the cooking oil market to assure its price remain low. To do so, the government uses a subsidy policy as one of its instruments. A dynamic duopoly model is...

The global push toward free trade and the consequent rise in volume of imports from a wider range of countries incurs the likelihood of introducing unwanted pathogens. Given that a zero-risk quarantine policy is not possible, there are tradeoffs between the gains from international trade and the...

Variability of rainfall and commodity prices are important off-farm factors influencing the profitability of dryland farming. Since neither of the above factors can be predicted, lessons from the past can be a preparation for the future. Analysing farm profit over ten years is suggested as a way...

The term “value chain” describes the collection of activities that are performed to design, produce, market, deliver and support a product. The Australian sugar industry value chain has a number of distinct stages involved in the transformation of the cane crop into raw and refined sugar and...

The recent analysis of global population forecasts of the past 30 years by the US National Academy of Sciences (Bongaarts and Bulatao, 2000) confirms that errors have been considerable and that population forecasts have generally been upward-biased. We adapt a standard global economic model to...

Australian wool producers are being told that exchange rate have driven systematic fluctuation in the price of their wool at auction. This paper presents some key findings of a major collaborative study on the effect of exchange rates on Australian wool prices with the Economic Research Centre...

Motivated by recent EC proposals to “strengthen risk management tools” in the CAP in relation to farmers’ increased exposure to market price risk, this paper draws attention to a potential negative consequence of such a change in the CAP – an associated increase in cheating behaviour by...

More than two centuries ago in his Essay on the Principle of Population, Thomas Malthus famously issued his dire prediction that mankind was doomed to survival at a subsistence level. His concept of population growth expanding to absorb the available food supply has been roundly contradicted by...