Initially, the global financial crisis caused a surge of financial inflows, raising Chinese investment but this abated in 2008, to be replaced by a slowdown in export demand. The government’s key response has been to commit to an unprecedented fiscal expansion. Two oft-ignored consequences...

China’s industrial reforms have left many key industries dominated by single or small numbers of firms, most of which remain state owned. Until recently, these firms have not been required to pay dividends to the state and the recent surge in China’s growth has made them very profitable,...

The retreat from public ownership of service firms and industries has left behind numerous private monopolies and oligopolies supervised by regulatory agencies. Services industries in government and private ownership generate two-thirds of Australia’s value added and employ three quarters of...

The World Bank's new series of Doing Business reports attempt to measure the relative ease of doing business in countries around the world. The output of this research is a set of rankings that enable each country to see how it looks relative to the others from the point of view of private...

Australia’s comparatively small and open economy is subject to boom-bust shocks that centre on its exporting mining and agricultural industries which, in average years, are minor contributors to its GDP. The associated real exchange rate effects, however, have important implications for...

It is logical to argue that low carbon goods and services (LCGS) led growth is an imperative for the Asia Pacific countries, particularly for the emerging Asian economies, which are heavily dependent on imported energy and resources. Acknowledging this fact, recently, governments in the Asian...

We adopt a new representation of the relationship between emissions and income using long-run growth rates. Our approach allows us to test multiple hypotheses about the drivers of per capita emissions in a single framework and avoid several of the econometric issues that have plagued previous...

The clearing of forests for agricultural land and other marketable purposes is a well-trodden path of economic development. With these private benefits from deforestation come external costs: emissions from deforestation currently account for 12 per cent of global carbon emissions. A widespread...

The prediction of future temperature increases depends critically on the projections of future greenhouse gas emissions. Yet there is a vigorous debate about how these projections should be undertaken and how reasonable is the approach of the Special Report on Emissions Scenarios (SRES)...

Recent papers by Wagner in this journal and Vollebergh et al. in the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management point out some fundamental econometric problems with traditional methods of estimating the environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) and propose alternative approaches that avoid these...