The establishment of a Commission of Audit has been a routine measure for newly elected conservative governments since the election of the Kennett government in Victoria in 1992. Most notably, Peter Costello, Treasurer in the incoming Howard government, appointed a commission headed by Professor...

A feature of the research contribution of Konrad Hagedorn is his proposals for the integration of economic, social and political dimensions of agricultural policy. His wholistic approach involves, in part, an extension of new institutionalism to public policy. This article identifies a number of...

This article outlines the efforts of a small NGO, the Mareeba Wetland Foundation, to conserve nature and conduct tourism at its Mareeba Tropical Savanna Wetland Reserve in northern Queensland. It provides background about the establishment of the reserve and its nature and draws on the results...

It is argued that while considerable development of animal health economics has occurred in recent decades, it has not yet achieved its potential coverage. It has been mostly applied to livestock, particularly livestock used for commerce, and its application to a range of other animals has been...

Income inequality has increased sharply in higher income countries. Theories attributing this to bifurcation of labor markets are examined. Some theorists attribute this bifurcation primarily to technical change with influence from globalization. Others take an opposite viewpoint. A contrasting...

In many Asian countries, women play a significant but varying role in the management of livestock and the use of common resources plays an important role in animal husbandry, and can affect the health of some types of livestock. This paper concentrates on village livestock in Thailand and makes...

We formulate a dynamic framework for an individual decision-maker within which discovery of previously unconsidered propositions is possible. Using a standard game-theoretic representation of the state space as a tree structure generated by the actions of agents (including acts of nature), we...

In this chapter, we compare the experience of Australia and New Zealand over the period of microeconomic reform that began in the early 1980s. Of particular concern is the question of how New Zealand, with what were seen at the time as the ‘best’ set of economic policies in the OECD,...

The paper begins with a schematic survey of the historical background, which provides the context for the changes embodied in WorkChoices, briefly described in Section 2. The core of the paper, Section 3, examines the role of choice and constraint in the design of the reforms. This analysis is...

We explore the relationship between the choice of the strategy space and outcomes in Tullock contests. In particular, in a framework where one of the contest's participants moves first, we show that there is an equilibrium where this individual wins the contest with probability one. We also show...