Improving smallholder welfare in the rural sectors of developing countries requires improving access to both input and product markets. Success, however, in developing sustainable and mutually beneficial links between smallholders and agribusiness has been variable. Two recent ACIAR studies...

This paper explores the likely impact of emissions trading design on transaction costs. Transaction costs include both the costs for the private sector to comply with the scheme rules and the costs of scheme administration. In economic theory transaction costs are often assumed to be zero. But...

Like the human immune system, a biosecurity system is a constellation of responses to external attacks comprising of many facets, a number of which can change to optimize the response to these unwanted intrusions. When either system hits the wrong target, or is inhibited or crippled somehow, the...

The dynamics of a population and a resource are investigated in a maximin model based on Brander and Taylor’s stylization of Easter Island, in order to consider the sustainability of the society represented. There are continua of both regular and non-regular maximin solutions, the type...

A rising saline aquifer in the Coleambally Irrigation Area constitutes a common pool resource, characterised by costly exclusion and rival utilisation for regional irrigators. The approach outlined in general terms in this paper is the application of formal, empirical techniques to guide the...

To maximise the economic benefits of tradable emission permits or emission taxes, while keeping these emission pricing mechanisms politically acceptable, requires the use of payment thresholds. There is no other way to avoid the "rock versus hard place" dilemma posed by the standard, polar forms...

Since the late 1980s, the concept of precaution has been incorporated into numerous international agreements and laws, as well as in domestic statutes and policies in many countries. This paper examines the international emergence of the concept and its application in Australia. Despite rapid...

Harold Hotelling proposed the first method for non-market valuation. Most of us believe this is the Travel Cost Method. In this paper I argue that the first method is from Hotelling's seminal study on the extraction of exhaustible resources. The first method is dynamic optimisation as applied to...

Many irrigation areas are facing the problems of aging infrastructure and a declining revenue base from which to fund maintenance and repair activities. The push toward full cost recovery for storage and delivery services arising from water reform policies means that some supply utilities will...