New Zealand’s approach to retirement incomes profoundly changed with the recent introduction of KiwiSaver and its associated tax incentives. Previous policy reduced lifetime inequality but KiwiSaver and its tax incentives will increase future inequality and lead to diverging living standards...

Immigrants are typically found to have less wealth and hold it in different forms than the native born. These differences may affect both the economic assimilation of immigrants and overall portfolio allocation when immigrants are a large share of the population, as in New Zealand. In this...

The economies of the former Soviet Bloc experienced large declines in output during the decade of transition which began with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Yet there are many reasons to believe that measured output and official deflators provide a poor proxy for the change in real...

After two decades of tax neutrality for private saving, New Zealand policy changed radically with the recent introduction of tax incentives for KiwiSaver. A key issue for tax-favoured saving schemes is the extent to which existing saving is reshuffled versus new saving created by reduced...

The paper investigates energy market integration in China by employing univariate, and panel-based unit root tests and Granger causality tests applied to a new, energy price data set. We identify price series that converge either to absolute or relative price parity. In addition we estimate the...

With its rapid economic growth, China’s primary energy consumption has exceeded domestic energy production since 1994, leading to a substantial expansion in energy imports, particularly of oil. China’s energy demand has an increasingly significant impact on global energy markets. In this...

Many are interested in China’s energy situation, however, numerous energy related issues in China still remain unanswered, for example, what are the potential forces driving energy demand and supply? Previous reviews focused only on fossil fuel based energy and ignored other important elements...

This paper examines the practical usefulness of two new journal performance metrics, namely the Eigenfactor score, which may be interpreted as measuring “Journal Influence”, and the Article Influence score, using the Thomson Reuters ISI Web of Science (hereafter ISI) data for 2009 for the...

We show that the asymptotic distribution of the ordinary least squares estimator in a cointegration regression may be bimodal. A simple case arises when the intercept is erroneously omitted from the estimated model or in nonlinear-in-variables models with endogenous regressors. In the latter...

The papers in this special issue of Mathematics and Computers in Simulation cover the following topics. Improving judgmental adjustment of model-based forecasts, whether forecast updates are progressive, on a constrained mixture vector autoregressive model, whether all estimators are born equal....