Agenda-A Journal of Policy Analysis and Reform最新文献

{"title":"Jan Libich, Real-World Economic Policy: Insights from Leading Australian Economists","authors":"Omer Majeed","doi":"10.22459/AG.23.01.2016.05","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.22459/AG.23.01.2016.05","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":41700,"journal":{"name":"Agenda-A Journal of Policy Analysis and Reform","volume":"81 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2016-12-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73712888","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Angus Deaton, The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality (Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2013)","authors":"Michael Palmer","doi":"10.22459/AG.23.01.2016.06","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.22459/AG.23.01.2016.06","url":null,"abstract":"Angus Deaton, The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality(Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2013)Professor Deaton's qualification for tackling this ambitious subject is acknowledged by his award of the 2015 Nobel Prize in Economics. There is perhaps no better authority to bring together the wide branches of health, wealth and inequality, which he does so masterfully in this book. It bespeaks a writer who says it all as he sees it; and not from the vantage of a Princeton ivory tower, but as someone who has spent a career thinking about how to measure and improve the lot of the world's worst off. In closing its pages, there is the sense that there is not much more left to say. It is the story of some of humanity's great escape from deprivation beside the inevitable remaining gaps in global wellbeing.This is, overall, an optimistic and uplifting read. The past 250 years have witnessed the most spectacular increase in human wellbeing in history. The economies of China and India, accounting for one-third of the world's population, have seen growth rates that are unparalleled in any country or time in history, supporting recent expansions in global living standards. Life expectancy in most parts of the world has soared on the back of achievements in child mortality (for example, a child born in sub-Saharan Africa today is more likely to live to the age of five than a child born in the UK just a century ago). However, it is a dual story of the 'dance between progress and inequality' where almost a billion people still live in destitution and countless children still die from the same diseases that killed European children in the 17th and 18th centuries.There are many books that tell separate stories of wealth and health inequality but in this book both stories are told at once. Wealth and health, it is argued, are each central parts of the story of human wellbeing. The merit of the book lies not in the telling of each story but in its attempt at weaving health and wealth as a self-reinforcing whole. Gaps in income, both between and within countries, correspond to gaps in health. The intriguing part of the story is the claim that income explains less about health than we would think ,which Deaton attributes (p. 97) to advancing knowledge and technology, human capital accumulation, and government capacity and institutional quality across countries:Turning the germ theory into safe water and sanitation takes time and requires both money and state capacity; these were not always available a century ago, and in many parts of the world they are not available today.While written by a self-professed economist, The Great Escape explores an impressive collection of writings on the subject, from demography, public health, anthropology and history. The book is written for a general audience in a style that is far from that of his earlier works such as An Analysis of Household Surveys. To ease digestion the core contents of the book are summ","PeriodicalId":41700,"journal":{"name":"Agenda-A Journal of Policy Analysis and Reform","volume":"28 35","pages":"93-96"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2016-12-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"72372310","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Alan Bollard, A Few Hares to Chase: The Life and Economics of Bill Phillips (Auckland University Press, Auckland, 2016)","authors":"S. Cornish","doi":"10.22459/AG.23.01.2016.07","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.22459/AG.23.01.2016.07","url":null,"abstract":"Alan Bollard, A Few Hares to Chase: The Life and Economics of Bill Phillips(Auckland University Press, Auckland, 2016)Thomas Carlyle called economics 'the dismal science'. Some aspects of economics may fairly be described as 'dismal'. But it would be a particularly harsh judgement - and an inaccurate one - if that description were applied to the discipline as a whole. If the increasing size of biographies (and autobiographies) of economists is used as the measure, it would appear that economists are anything but dismal. Take John Maynard Keynes, for example. Robert Skidelsky's life of Keynes covers three volumes, totalling some 1,758 pages; Donald Moggridge's single-volume biography of Keynes is 941 pages in length. And Keynes was only 62 when he died! Susan Howson's life of Lionel Robbins is 1,161 pages; Peter Groenewegen's life of Alfred Marshall is 864 pages; and Marjorie Harper's biography of Sir Douglas Copland, The Australian National University's first Vice-Chancellor, is 548 pages. These economists must have been doing some interesting things to warrant such prolonged engagement by their biographers - and most assuredly they did.Bill Phillips, the author of the eponymous 'Phillips Curve', and the subject of A Few Hares to Chase, was many things: modest, sober, unpretentious, imaginative, inquisitive and a genius; but rarely, if ever, dismal. Alan Bollard, the former Governor of the Reserve Bank of New Zealand, and the author of this biography of Phillips, refers to his subject as 'remarkable'. And so he was. Here was a man born on a small dairy farm in 1914 in an obscure part of New Zealand, who went to local schools, qualified as an electrician after serving an apprenticeship with a local hydro-electric authority, worked for some years in the back blocks of New South Wales and Queensland, crossed Asia and Europe on the trans-Siberian railway before the outbreak of the Second World War, enlisted in the RAF in London, was captured by the Japanese while trying to escape at the fall of Singapore, spent the rest of the war in appalling conditions in prisoner-of-war camps at various locations on the island of Java, returned to London via New Zealand after the war, enrolled for a degree in sociology at the London School of Economics (LSE), successfully completed a PhD in economics at LSE, was appointed to one of the most prestigious chairs of economics in the world (the Tooke chair, which had previously been occupied by Friedrich Hayek), wrote one of the most cited articles in economics, accepted a research chair in economics at ANU and died in 1975 at the of 60, lecturing, at the University of Auckland, until the day before he died.Bollard has written a superb biography of the man, at once concise, elegant and extensively researched. The essential biographical details of Phillips's life are told against the backdrop of local and world history, with the contemporary events linked to the personal story in such a way that the two appear to be sea","PeriodicalId":41700,"journal":{"name":"Agenda-A Journal of Policy Analysis and Reform","volume":"2014 1","pages":"97-102"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2016-12-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86616741","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Section 18C, human rights, and media reform: An institutional analysis of the 2011-13 Australian free speech debate","authors":"C. Berg, S. Davidson","doi":"10.22459/AG.23.01.2016.01","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.22459/AG.23.01.2016.01","url":null,"abstract":"The paper examines two Australian freedom-of-speech controversies between 2011 and 2013 – the debate over section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act, and the debate over the Gillard Government's print media laws. These controversies featured rhetorical and ideological debate about the limits of free speech and the nature of human rights. The paper applies a subjective political economy framework to these debates in order to trace the effect of increased perceived disorder costs and dictatorship costs of freedom-of-speech restrictions. The paper concludes that policy change is driven by exogenous changes in perceived institutional costs. In the case of the Gillard Government's media laws, those costs were borne by the Gillard Government, and one would not expect print media laws to be a major political issue in the absence of a further exogenous shock. In the case of section 18C the revealed dictatorship costs of legislation, which includes the words 'offend' and 'insult', suggest the section 18C controversy will endure.","PeriodicalId":41700,"journal":{"name":"Agenda-A Journal of Policy Analysis and Reform","volume":"11 1","pages":"5-30"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2016-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85698007","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Optimal Size of Local Government, with Special Reference to New South Wales","authors":"P. Abelson","doi":"10.22459/AG.23.01.2016.02","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.22459/AG.23.01.2016.02","url":null,"abstract":"The paper discusses the major criteria for determining the optimal size of local government, and advances an evidence-based critique of the New South Wales Government's program to reduce the number of local councils.","PeriodicalId":41700,"journal":{"name":"Agenda-A Journal of Policy Analysis and Reform","volume":"10 1","pages":"31-46"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2016-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79630274","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Reallocating Australia's Scarce Mental Health Resources","authors":"Ruth F. Williams, D. Doessel","doi":"10.22459/AG.23.01.2016.03","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.22459/AG.23.01.2016.03","url":null,"abstract":"This paper applies some simple analytical tools from the economists' toolbox to shed some light on a sleeper issue in Australia's mental health sector. The problem is that there are large numbers of people with no diagnosed mental health condition who consume mental health services. Simultaneously, there are large numbers of people who have very serious mental health problems who receive no mental health services. This untreated group is often referred to as those with ?unmet need?, a much-heard term. We refer to the first group as people with 'met non-need', a term hardly ever heard. Although the solution to the unmet-need problem is the oft-heard call for increased government expenditure, no attention is directed to the wasted expenditure associated with the 'met non-need' group: the met non-need issue is 'the elephant in the room'. We point to an alternative policy response; that is, a reallocation of resources from the met non-need group to the unmet need group. To achieve this, we direct focus upon a structural reform in the processes of supplying mental health services.","PeriodicalId":41700,"journal":{"name":"Agenda-A Journal of Policy Analysis and Reform","volume":"109 1","pages":"47-72"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2016-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80793209","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"China and the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement: Misfit or Missed Opportunity?","authors":"Bala Ramasamy, Matthew C. H. Yeung","doi":"10.22459/AG.23.01.2016.04","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.22459/AG.23.01.2016.04","url":null,"abstract":"If it eventuates the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement (TPP) will include major economic powerhouses like the US and Japan, but China - the elephant in the room - has been excluded. Our evaluation of how China might fare in the TPP finds that the agreement would be a poor fit at the current stage of China's economic development. Although China would gain both in terms of trade and a reform timetable, some features of this 21st-century agreement - the assistance given to state-owned enterprises, the standards for labour rights, protection of multinationals against the state and competition laws - would be stumbling blocks in the negotiation process. Thus, being left out of the TPP is no big loss for China.","PeriodicalId":41700,"journal":{"name":"Agenda-A Journal of Policy Analysis and Reform","volume":"19 1","pages":"73-88"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2016-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87210607","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Whither Business History?: Memory, Message and Meaning","authors":"D. Merrett","doi":"10.22459/AG.22.01.2015.04","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.22459/AG.22.01.2015.04","url":null,"abstract":"IntroductionI started my Bachelor of Economics at Monash University in 1963. My arrival intersected the publications of Noel Butlin's two seminal pioneering works, Australian Domestic Product (1962) and Investment in Australian Economic Development, 1861-1900 (1964). Of course, I had no idea at the time how Noel's work, and the discipline of Australian economic history he created almost single-handedly, would shape my professional life. I was one of the lucky ones who found gainful employment in the burgeoning departments of economic history that sprang up in so many universities. While I never worked at ANU, I met Noel on many occasions. All of us in the field were drawn to Canberra for conferences and seminars, and to use the wonderful collection of records at the Noel Butlin Archives Centre (NBAC).The question I want to explore is the future of archives, such as the NBAC and the one at my own university. My broad point is that the supply of business history and the demand for it by corporates have changed significantly in the past few decades. The most pessimistic interpretation is that the changing practice of business history within universities and the increasing reluctance of business to permit independent 'outsiders' access to their records bodes ill for specialist archives.Let me start with a paradox. More and more is being written about 'business', but the work of researchers, whom we might describe as business historians drawing on archival material, is situated on the margins of this avalanche. What scholars write tends, with some notable exceptions, to be read only by other business historians. Telling stories about business that reaches a mass audience is done by others, most notably by journalists and critics of various hues, and this information reaches its audience through a variety of media. Archives holding extensive records relating to individual firms will be less useful to those current and future scholars working in a shifting paradigm of 'business history'. A recent paper by de Jong, Higgins and van Driel in Business History showed that only around 20 per cent of the articles published in the leading business history journals from 1970 to 2012 were written about a firm! Moreover, I fear that in the current climate and foreseeable future it will be harder to persuade companies to donate their records to archives that mandate the independence of scholars using them.My argument progresses in a number of steps. First, I want to discuss the changes in what I call the 'practice' of business history that lessen the demand from academic practitioners for access to comprehensive archival material. Second, I want to suggest that firms today are less likely to make over their records for scholarly analysis than they were a generation or so ago. I will conclude by suggesting that the tide may yet turn back to the commissioning of full-blown histories.The practice of business historyThe practice of business history - the questions rais","PeriodicalId":41700,"journal":{"name":"Agenda-A Journal of Policy Analysis and Reform","volume":"30 1","pages":"63-74"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2015-12-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88364789","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Wider Economic Impacts in Transport Infrastructure Cost-Benefit Analysis - A Bridge Too Far?","authors":"L. Dobes, J. Leung","doi":"10.22459/AG.22.01.2015.05","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.22459/AG.22.01.2015.05","url":null,"abstract":"Proponents of transport infrastructure have in recent decades sought to augment the estimated benefit of major projects beyond conventional cost-benefit analysis. Improved transport links are claimed to increase Marshallian external economies of scale; to reduce transport costs experienced by imperfectly competitive industries, and so induce them to increase their output; and to increase supply of labour, in response to lower transport costs, and thereby increase GDP and tax receipts. Estimates of the value of these three additional effects have resulted in multipliers and 'uprate factors' that appear to be applied by some government agencies to transport sector benefits calculated using conventional CBA. However, empirical estimates of these effects are likely to be exaggerated.","PeriodicalId":41700,"journal":{"name":"Agenda-A Journal of Policy Analysis and Reform","volume":"25 1","pages":"75-98"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2015-12-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82145596","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Australian public's preferences over foreign investment in agriculture","authors":"J. Laurenceson, Paul F. Burke, Edward Wei","doi":"10.22459/AG.22.01.2015.03","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.22459/AG.22.01.2015.03","url":null,"abstract":"This paper estimates a model of how the Australian public's preferences over foreign investment in agriculture are determined. The results show that the attributes of foreign investment of greatest concern to the public are not the same as those used by the foreign investment approvals regime to flag proposals for scrutiny.","PeriodicalId":41700,"journal":{"name":"Agenda-A Journal of Policy Analysis and Reform","volume":"30 1","pages":"45-62"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2015-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78238621","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}