One of the most striking developments of the late 20th century was the explosion in the volume, speed and complexity of international financial transactions, and the resulting breakdown of effective regulatory control over the global financial system. The speed with which this process has gone...

The idea of using ?fat taxes? to curb obesity rates has been raised by many. In particular, the idea of taxing sugar-sweetened beverages (SSBs) has received considerable attention in the United States and has recently been discussed by President Obama. Rather less attention has been given to the...

Economics and the Future tackles the discounting issue from a number of angles, ranging from relatively short-term private financial decisions, to very long-term public issues spanning generations. The authors present differing perspectives and original ideas in a style that remains accessible...

On 2 June 2009, the Queensland Government announced a programme of asset sales projected to realise $15 billion. In this article, the public case for privatisation put forward by the Queensland Government is shown to be wrong and, in important respects, deliberately misleading. It is argued...

We focus on syntactic aspects of di¤erential awareness that give rise to contractual disputes. Boundedly rational parties use a common language, but do not share a common understanding of the world, leading to ambiguity in both syntactic and semantic forms. In contractual relationships,...

This chapter argues that Australia’s labour market – indeed most capitalist labour markets – feature too much unemployment and underemployment and associated forms of labour market insecurity or disadvantage. The later term implies a weak or tenuous connection to the labour force through...

Among economists, discussion of problems involving uncertainty is po­ larised between advocates of formal decision theories, who claim that un­ certainty can be tamed by careful consideration of information and elicita­ tion of preferences, and critics who argue that uncertainty is...

In this chapter we argue that Australia’s labour market features too much unemployment, underemployment or associated forms of labour market insecurity. The later term implies a weak or tenuous connection to the labour force through underemployment or involuntary casual or part-time work...

The pattern of boom and bust that characterised the Australian economy from the early 1970s to the early 1990s currently seem to be a thing of the past as Australia enters its sixteenth year of uninterrupted expansion. The expansion has lasted twice as long as those of the 1970s and 1980s, which...

We present a model of competitive interaction among n symmetric firms producing a homogeneous good that includes both Bertrand and Cournot competition as special cases. In our model the intensity of competition is captured by a single parameter—the perceived slope of competitors’ supply...