This study considers the efficiency of banking in Australia during the post-deregulation period 1988-2001. Since 1986 restrictions upon foreign bank entry and foreign ownership have been affectively abolished. Using Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) and Malmquist Indices, we find that the new...

This study applies parametric distance functions to estimate the efficiency of foreign banks in Australia, and subsequently employs extreme bounds analysis to establish the determinants of foreign bank efficiency that are robust to model specification. The limited global advantage hypothesis of...

This article describes how the quarterly output of the financial services sector is measured in the National Accounts. Then at a sub-sector level, an analysis of recent employment and output trends is presented to describe the impact of the current economic downturn on the activity of the...

Methods explainedThe concept of cost-benefit analysis (CBA) originated in the UnitedStates in the 1930s where it was used to create a solution toproblems of water provision. The process arrived in the UK in the1960s for use in the transportation sector, where it was applied tothe construction of...

Gross Domestic Product (GDP), or the size of the economy, can be measured in three ways. These are the output, income and expenditure approaches. ONS routinely measures all three for the UK economy, but publishes a single 'coherent' estimate of GDP. This article explains the role of alignment...

Highlights relationships within component inventories data,between GDP and inventories and the relative importance of individual sectors' holdingsThere are a number of contrasting economic theories regarding companies’ motivations for holding inventories. One theory suggests firms use...

SUMMARYThe household saving ratio summarises the income and expenditure positions of the household sector. This article considers developments in the ratio during the current recession, discussing the drivers in income and consumption and their interaction in the context of developments in the...

Using a panel fixed effects model for a sample of 121 countries covering 1975 ]2005, we examine how financial development, financial liberalization and banking crises are related to income inequality. In contrast with most previous work, our results suggest that all finance variables increase...

We introduce the revised version of the KOF Globalisation Index, a composite index measuring globalization for every country in the world along the economic, social and political dimension. The original index was introduced by Dreher (2006) and updated in Dreher et al. (2008). This second...

Recent literature proposes many variables as significant determinants of pollution. This paper gives an overview of this literature and asks which of these factors have an empirically robust impact on water and air pollution, i.e. do not depend upon the conditioning information set. For this, we...