China’s pension system is in need of comprehensive reform in that it is fragmented in its coverage and significantly under-funded. Attempts to improve the coverage will likely exacerbate the financial strains. Thus it is urgent to improve the financial sustainability of the system and one...

During the 1970s and 1980s, the external debt levels of poor countries rose to a level constituting a ‘debt crisis.’ The main source of the supply of external debt was the surplus revenue generated by the OPEC through significant increases in the price of oil during the 1970s. Unfortunately,...

China’s local government debt (LGD) has recently become the focus of economic policy debates. However, information about LGD and its impact on economic growth in the Chinese economy is scarce. This paper attempts to present an empirical investigation of the impact of China’s LGD on economic...

Trade and technology driven increases in skill premia in the older industrial regions since the 1980s have raised the spectre of “skill shortages”, one consequence of which has been freer migration of skilled and professional workers from developing regions. The links between demographic...

Product and financial market integration determine the global implications of China’s recent growth surge and its on-going transition from export led growth. These alter China’s structural imbalance (its excess product supply and excess saving), which in turn shifts the international terms...

Western Australia introduced a domestic gas reservation policy in 2006, which requires new gas developments to supply the equivalent of 15 per cent of their gas exports to the Western Australian domestic gas market. The aim of the policy is to maintain domestic gas prices below export parity. It...

Personal carbon trading (PCT) is a downstream cap-and-trade scheme used to reduce carbon emissions from the household sector. It is argued that the PCT scheme could provide a buffer between the energy price and the total energy price, and thus energy demand remains stable. However these effects...

This paper utilizes regression based inequality decomposition methodology developed by Field (2003) to determine factors driving income inequality at household level in Botswana. Using the Household Income and Expenditure Survey of 2002/03 an income generating function is estimated using OLS....