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...

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...

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...

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...

China is considering a national emissions trading scheme, to follow several pilot schemes, as part of the suite of policies to reduce the growth of greenhouse gas emissions. A carbon tax or tax-like scheme could be an alternative. However there are special challenges in a fast-growing economy...

This paper investigates the short-run effects of economic growth on carbon dioxide emissions from the combustion of fossil fuels and the manufacture of cement for 189 countries over the period 1961–2010. Contrary to what has previously been reported, we conclude that there is no strong...

China has gradually recognized that the conventional path of encouraging economic growth at the expense of the environment cannot be sustained. It has to be changed. This article focuses on ChinaÕs efforts towards energy conservation and environmental quality. The article discusses a variety of...

The expansion in the supply of energy services over the last couple of centuries has reduced the apparent importance of energy in economic growth despite energy being an essential production input. We demonstrate this by developing a simple extension of the Solow growth model, which we use to...

There has been extensive analysis of the drivers of carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuel combustion and cement production, which constituted only 55% of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in 1970 and 65% in 2010. But there has been much less analysis of the drivers of greenhouse gases in...