At the request of the Minister for Industry, Science and Resources, the Assistant Treasurer asked the Commission to undertake a research study examining the performance of commercial buildings and analyse any impediments to better performance of such buildings and how to overcome them. The study...

On 24 August 1998 the Treasurer referred the implementation of Ecologically Sustainable Development (ESD) by Commonwealth departments and agencies to the Commission for inquiry and report within nine months of receipt of the reference.

In August 2002, the Commission was asked to look at the economic and social importance of the different industries in the Great Barrier Reef and its catchment. The Commission also would evaluate the costs and benefits of actions to address declining water quality which currently threatens the...

Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) is a linear programming based method for evaluating performance of comparable production units such as firms. Although the method is already extensively applied in many areas of economics, its use in environmental economics and related fields remains limited. The...

If, in international agreements, governments “link'' trade to environmental policy (or other issues with non-pecuniary externalities), will this promote more cooperation in both policies or will cooperation in one policy be strengthened at the expense of the other? We analyze this question in...

To help explain some of the issues and examine the potential environmental impacts (positive and/or negative) of selected tax arrangements, the Productivity Commission sought advice from Robert Douglas, a specialist in the field. This consultant’s report makes a contribution to understanding...

Ecosystem services are the functions performed by ecosystems that lead to desirable environmental outcomes, such as air and water purification, drought and flood mitigation, and climate stabilisation. Markets rarely exist for them. This study examines how newly defined property rights have been...

Many production processes yield both good outputs and undesirable ones (e.g. pollutants). In this paper, we develop a generalization of a stochastic frontier model which is appropriate for such technologies. We discuss efficiency analysis and, in particular, define technical and environmental...