Cornelsen et al. (2014) and Green et al. (2013) provide a comprehensive review/summary of a large number of recent estimates of the price responsiveness of food consumption using a meta-regression approach. For seven food items, they present uncompensated elasticities that include both the...

At any given instance there are many indicators of the state of the economy or the state of a sector and frequently the signals are mixed – some may point to an expansion, others to a contraction, for example. We consider how best to combine this conflicting information into an overall index...

Half a century ago, Barten (1964) and Theil (1965) formulated what is now known as the Rotterdam model. A path-breaking innovation, this system of demand equations allowed for the first time rigorous testing of the theory of the utility-maximising consumer. This has led to a vibrant, on-going...

The surge in new resource projects has been a prominent feature of the recent strong performance of the Australian economy, with mining and energy investment accounting for almost one-half of all private investment. Although the current round of resource investment has now peaked, as resource...

As they involve expectations about the future and long lead times for planning and construction, the evolution of investment projects is usually complex and volatile. This paper analyses an important aspect of this volatility by studying the nature of the investment process, from the initial...

One measure of the change in the “quality” of consumption is the degree to which the consumption basket as a whole moves towards more luxurious goods, away from necessities. We introduce two related measures based on the luxury/necessity distinction. One is an index of the extent to which...

The dispersion of the distribution of relative prices in poor countries is substantially higher than that in the rich. As in 130+ countries relative prices are closely related to incomes, we develop a model that shows that the prices of luxuries (necessities) rise (fall) with income growth. This...

The stochastic approach to index numbers has been successfully applied to the estimation of the Consumer Price Index (CPI). One distinct advantage of this approach is that it provides the whole distribution of the index, not simply a point estimate of the rate of inflation. In this paper, we...

This paper uses a descriptive statistical approach to identify longer-term patterns, or empirical regularities, in the prices of 16 prominent metals from 1950 to 2010. We also examine some related aspects of the behaviour of the corresponding volumes. Our approach is to summarise the data in the...