The spontaneous growth of Vietnam’s 2,790 rural craft villages has been a mixed blessing. Specialising in ‘traditional’ crafts such as processed foods, textiles and furniture, as well as newer commodities, such as recycled products, craft businesses have expanded rapidly since Vietnam...

This article investigates whether female political representation affects economic growth. Panel estimates for 119 democracies using fixed effects specifications and a system generalized method of moments approach suggest that, over recent decades, countries with higher shares of women in...

Recently, there has been increasing focus and concern regarding transmission of tuberculosis (TB) in the Papua New Guinea (PNG)-Australia cross-border region. In particular, there is growing recognition that preventing the emergence and spread of drug resistant TB is of vital importance to both...

The 15 members of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) are digesting a critical review of the structure and performance of its Secretariat, which describes the overall CARICOM integration initiative as being in crisis. This paper describes elements of the CARICOM integration project, and draws...

Fragile states are those characterised by problems of weak governance or of conflict, internal or cross border. They are also described, less crisply but more carefully, as countries in fragile and conflict affected situations – hence the acronym used in this paper, FCA countries. For about a...

A 7 variate SVAR model is used to identify the presence and causes of overvaluation in real house prices in Australia from 2002 to 2008. An important feature of the model is the development of a housing sector where long-run restrictions are derived from economic theory to identify housing...

This paper generalizes and qualifies an influential monetary policy result due to Rogoff (1985) by taking fiscal policy, and fiscal-monetary interactions, into account. It shows that an appointment of a conservative central banker may, under a range of circum- stances, (i) increase the average...

To estimate the emissions reductions and costs of a climate policy, analysts usually compare a policy scenario with a baseline scenario of future economic conditions without the policy. Both scenarios require assumptions about the future course of numerous factors such as population growth,...

Inflation targeting (henceforth IT) has emerged as a significant monetary policy framework in both developed and transition economies. It has been in place for a decade or more in a number of countries - with around 20 central banks adopting it as their basic monetary policy framework. Some...

This paper provides empirical evidence on the effects of Chinese resource demand on the resource rich natural resource supplier using the example of Australia. A structural VAR model is used to examine the effects of Chinese resource demand, commodity prices and foreign output on the...