Today's labour-scarce economies have open trade and closed immigration policies, while a century ago they had just the opposite, open immigration and closed trade policies. Why the inverse policy correlation, and why has it persisted for almost two centuries? This paper seeks answers to this...

This paper examines, for a range of utilities in Australia, Canada, Germany, Israel and the United States, prices, the cost factors influencing prices and quality of service. The utilities were chosen to minimise differences in operating characteristics.

Overcoming Indigenous Disadvantage: Key Indicators 2003 highlights the marked disparities between Indigenous and other Australians. While not the first report to assemble data on the social or economic status of Indigenous people, it is distinguished by the strategic framework within which the...

The objective of the paper is to answer an often-asked question : if tariff rates are reduced, what will happen to wage inequality ? We consider two types of wage inequality : between occupations (skills premium), and between industries. We use two large data bases of wage inequality that have...

New Zealand has had a complex process of adjusting commercial policy since the economic reforms began in 1984. This paper reports on the results of a research project to estimate the trends in industry assistance over this period and the variance of assistance within 2- digit industry groupings.

Starting from the observation that Thailand succeeded in developing its exports in a spectacular way in the decades preceding the 1997 financial crisis, the author points to a number of apparent paradoxes that become apparent when looking at Thai trade policies in detail. For example, Thai trade...