Using data on 61 oil companies from 2001-09, we examine the evolution of revenue efficiency of National Oil Companies (NOCs) and shareholder-owned oil companies (SOCs). We find that NOCs generally are less efficient than SOCs, but their efficiency increased faster over the last decade. We also...

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...

The term "middle income trap" has been widely used in the literature, without having been clearly dened or formally tested. We propose a statistical denition of a middle income trap and derive a simple time-series test. We nd that the concept survives a rigorous scrutiny of the data, with the...

Chinese GDP growth faces rising handicaps that include the slowdown and eventual contraction of its labour force, a complication of which is its rising sex ratio at birth. The undesirable consequences of the resulting gender imbalance include excessive saving as families with boys compete to...

In many cases, a company’s capital investment decision is not a one-off “yes/no”, but occurs as a result of a sequence of decisions of a more preliminary nature. Major resource investment projects, for example, typically have to pass several “feasibility” tests before companies fully...

This paper examines the impact of intra-provincial regional inequality on crime rates in China. The results show that intra-provincial regional inequality is positively correlated with the crime rate in the regions. However, education is found to be negatively correlated with the crime rate. In...

Both before and after the federal election campaign in 2010, Australians were frequently told that they were spared the worst effects of the Global Financial Crisis because of the government’s timely and decisive fiscal stimulus. However, there are at least two other possibilities: monetary...

This paper examines the impacts of globalization on intra-provincial inequality in China. The empirical analysis is based on a dataset of Chinese counties and county-level cities. It is found that foreign direct investment (FDI) and intra-provincial regional inequality are negatively correlated,...

The 2012-13 Budget, which provides for an increase in taxes of $ 39 billion and a reduction in expenditures of $ 7 billion, is strongly contractionary, reducing aggregate demand by about 2 per cent. The government deserves praise for starting the process of fiscal consolidation in a possible...