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 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...

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...

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 Productivity Commission Staff Working Paper, ‘Precaution and the Precautionary Principle: two Australian case studies’ (by Annette Weier and Paul Loke), was released in September 2007. The Precautionary Principle was conceived as a response to the inherent difficulties faced by decision...

This Productivity Commission Staff Working Paper ‘The Growth of Labour Hire Employment in Australia’ was released in February 2005. This paper is part of an ongoing labour market research program at the Productivity Commission to examine developments in employment relationships and the...

By lowering the cost of trade between the country of residence and the country of birth, migrants appear to reduce trade with other countries, so that the overall effect on aggregate trade is small. The effects of migrants on foreign direct investment appear to be different. Bilateral investment...

General government investment in infrastructure has fallen in recent years for most of the countries in this study, (information is not available to assess whether this is true for public investment more generally). Nevertheless, overall investment in infrastructure has remained fairly steady in...