On 28 August 1998 the Treasurer referred the impact of competition policy reforms on rural an regional Australia for inquiry and report within 12 months of receiving the reference. The Commission is to assess the impact (both transitional and ongoing) of the competition policy and related...

New Zealand is unusual in that nearly 60% of local services are funded from property taxes. These are a mixture of land taxes, capital value taxes, annual rental value taxes and uniform general charges. We explore the efficiency and equity of this system at both national and local levels. We...

The widespread ennoblement of the Spanish bourgeoisie in the sixteenth century has been traditionally considered one of the main causes of Iberian decline. I document and quantify the surge in ennoblement through a new time series of nobility cases preserved in the Archive of the Royal Chancery...

Recent empirical evidence, from countries in the European Union in particular, are much more ambiguous on the costs savings from private production of local public services than previous literature used to be. In this paper, an explanatory model of factors driving costs in solid waste collection...

Using a South African data set, the paper poses six questions about the determinants of subjective well-being. Much of the paper is concerned with the role of relative concepts. We find that comparator income – measured as average income of others in the local residential cluster - enters the...

South Africa has been facing the double challenge of integrating into global markets as a competitive economy and of overcoming the internal problems created and constantly reinforced by the previous regime. To realize the objective of economic growth through competitiveness on the one hand and...

In a sequential Computable General Equilibrium analysis, we investigate the likely effects of the EU-South Africa Free Trade agreement (FTA), with a special emphasis on South Africa’s growth prospects. We find that the FTA increases South African output and welfare. We note, however, that the...

This paper proposes a new test to distinguish between the two leading theories of discrimination: preference versus information. Discrimination based on preferences occurs when people behave as if they refuse to change their stereotypes about the capabilities of discriminated individuals. Those...

This is a brief and largely descriptive summary of migration flows in and out of Lesotho, and trends therein over tha last forty years. It includes some explanatory discussion and some speculation about likely future trends.

There are significant differences in the way water rights are defined, allocated and administered in Australia and overseas. This paper includes comparisons of the arrangements for managing water rights against accepted best practice principles for South Au stralia, Queensland, NSW, Victoria...