This review attempts to identify treatments of corruption that draw upon characteristics of underdevelopment either as causes or as consequences. It focuses on three aspects of corruption in developing economies: red tape, rent-seeking, and the abundance of intermediaries. Red tape is presented...

Indexes often incorporate various biases due to their methods of construction. The Constant Elasticity of Substitution (CES) index can potentially eliminate substitution bias without needing current period expenditure data. The CES index requires an elasticity parameter. We derive a system of...

In this paper I analyse how I became an economist and at the same time a democratic socialist and a Christian. I also explained how I became politically involved after my graduate studies at Cambridge in the late 1950s and started lecturing at Adelaide. When back in Cambridge, teaching in the...

The empirical literature on price indices consistently finds that aggregation methods have a considerable impact, particularly when scanner data are used. This paper outlines a novel approach to test for the homogeneity of goods and hence for the appropriateness of aggregation. A hedonic...

This paper introduces series of house and land prices for Australia’s major capital cities for the period 1880-1970 which, spliced to modern data, give series spanning 1880-2010. The broad trends in prices for houses, land and rents highlight no significant movement in real prices for the...

Chaining is used in index number construction to update weights and link new items into an index. However, chained indexes can suffer from, sometimes substantial, drift. The Consumer Price Index Manual (ILO, 2004) recommends the use of dissimilarity indexes to determine when chaining is...

The Australian Renewable Energy Target (RET) has spurred considerable investment in renewable electricity generation, notably wind power, over the past decade. This paper considers the distributional implications of the RET for different electricity customers. Using time-series regression, we...

In a contribution to the sparse literature on the impacts on consumers of quarantine restrictions, an innovative approach to analysing the effects of these policies on the prices and quality of imported products is proposed. Specifically, various index num- ber decompositions at different...

This paper examines the impact of investment in research and innovation on Australian market sector productivity. While previous studies have largely focused on a narrow class of private sector intangible assets as a source of productivity gains, this paper shows that there is a broad range of...