In this article we model production technology in a state-contingent framework. Our model analyzes production under uncertainty without being explicit about the nature of producer risk preferences. In our model producers’ risk preferences are captured by the risk-neutral probabilities they...

Climate change is likely to have substantial effects on irrigated agriculture. Extreme climate events such as droughts are likely to become more common. These patterns are evident in median projections of climate change for the Murray–Darling Basin in Australia. Understanding climate change...

The mining industry in Australia, and in most other countries, pay special taxes for the use of community owned resources in additional to taxes levied on businesses in general. General taxes include the corporate income tax, payroll and transaction taxes, and labour pay personal income taxes....

In this paper, we consider an extension of the commonly used poverty gap measure that may be used to address he question of whether the elimination of poverty is a feasible objective, given sufficient political commitment. The resources potentially available to address poverty may be measured by...

On 2 June 2009, the Queensland government announced a program of asset sales projected to realise $15 billion. In this paper, the public case for privatisation put forward by the Queensland government is case is shown to be wrong and, in important respects, deliberately misleading. It is argued...

For much of the 20th century, the expansion of irrigated agriculture in the Murray Darling Basin, was treated as a self-evidently desirable objective, to be pursued without excessive regard to questions of economic costs and benefits. Irrigation seemed to offer a ‘droughtproofing’ solution...

For most of the last decade, water policy in Australia has been dominated by emergency responses to what was, on most measures, the worst drought in our history. Irrigators have received only small fractions of their normal allocations of water, while urban water users have been subject to...

One of the most striking developments of the late 20th century was the explosion in the volume, speed and complexity of international financial transactions, and the resulting breakdown of effective regulatory control over the global financial system. The speed with which this process has gone...

In this paper, it is argued that, given its relatively short duration and high year-to-year variability, the MFP data set does not contain enough information to allow clear statistical discrimination between competing hypotheses. As a result of this lack of information, combined with the human...

Recent developments in the global system of cities present a curious paradox. With the cost of communications declining almost to zero and substantial, though less dramatic reductions in transport costs, there is now little technical requirement for most kinds of production to be undertaken in...