This paper examines the idea of making international income comparisons on the basis of food consumption patterns. We commence by giving a brief review on the different ways of measuring real income and highlight some of the problems. Next, we embark on an international journey by analyzing food...

Fiscal decentralisation has attracted attention from government, academic studies, and international institutions with the aims of enhancing economic growth in recent years. One of the difficult issues is to measure satisfactorily the degree of fiscal decentralisation across countries. This...

Sustained economic growth in China has triggered a surge of energy imports, especially oil imports. This paper investigates the determinants of China’s energy import demand by using cointegraiton and VECM techniques. The findings suggest that, in the long run, growth of industrial production...

Even though important analytical concepts named after Vilfredo Pareto were, and still are, employed in public finance theory, Pareto was actually a harsh critic of the Italian public finance tradition, especially the classic studies on public goods and the reliance on the benefit principle when...

The aim of this paper is to quantify the determinants of happiness in university students, with information drawn from a survey conducted with students at the University of Western Australia in 2003. Ordered probit and ordinary least squares models are applied. Happiness could be measured and...

In China inter-regional per capita output disparities are large and persistent and increasingly a matter for policy concern at the highest levels of government. Interregional spillovers are an important ingredient in the design of regional development policy. Yet little is known about the...

This paper analyses data from the University of Western Australia (UWA) Graduate Destination Survey linked to information from the University’s Student Records System to explore the determinants of graduates’ starting salaries over the years 2002 to 2004. While the details examined also...