The staff working paper ‘Stranded Irrigation Assets’ (Roper, H., Sayers, C. and Smith, A) was released on 28 June 2006. Prior to the National Water Initiative (NWI), irrigation authorities imposed restrictions on outward trade of water entitlements partly to protect remaining irrigators...

The Productivity Commission Staff Working Paper, ‘Men not at Work - An Analysis of Men Outside the Workforce’ (by Ralph Lattimore), was released in January 2007. This paper analyses the characteristics of adult men outside the labour force in Australia. The paper finds that, in contrast to...

Investment in capital is important for economic growth. But capital is not just physical assets; firms also invest in 'soft' capital such as knowledge, firm-specific skills, and better ways of doing business. This investment results in accumulation of 'intangible assets'. Intangible assets have...

The Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) of the European Union has undergone significant reform since the early 1990s, with the aim of improving its market orientation. There is an increasing focus on breaking the link between direct income payments and production decisions — so called...

The Productivity Commission Staff Working Paper, ‘Effects of Health and Education on Labour Force Participation’ (by Patrick Laplagne, Maurice Glover and Anthony Shomos) was released in May 2007. The paper explores alternative methodologies to obtain estimates of the labour force...

A Productivity Commission Staff Working Paper, Armington Elasticities and Terms of Trade Effects in Global CGE Models by Xiao-guang Zhang was released on 8 February 2006, in conjunction with the staff working paper, The Armington Model. Armington elasticities specify the degrees of substitution...

Mining typically accounts for around 5 per cent of Australia's nominal market sector gross domestic product. Long lead times between investment in new capacity in mining and the associated output response can lead to short term movements in mining multifactor productivity (MFP) unrelated to...

A Productivity Commission Staff Working Paper, The Armington Model, by Peter Lloyd and Xiao-guang Zhang was released on 8 February 2006, in conjunction with an additional staff working paper, Armington Elasticities and Terms of Trade Effects in Global CGE Models. The paper explores how models...

Births in Australia are at an historical high - with around 285 000 babies born in 2007. This corresponds to an estimated total fertility rate of 1.93 babies per woman, the highest since the early 1980s. This is not a one-off event as fertility rates have been generally rising for the last 6...

The purpose of this paper is to contrast an Armington-based model with the traditional Heckscher-Ohlin framework familiar to textbook trade theory. The models concentrate on different aspects of the gains from trade, and both have deficiencies. The paper argues that by combining both frameworks,...