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

{"title":"Paying the Penalty? The High Price of Penalty Rates in Australian Restaurants","authors":"P. Lewis","doi":"10.22459/AG.21.01.2014.01","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.22459/AG.21.01.2014.01","url":null,"abstract":"As a result of decisions by numerous state and federal commissions and tribunals, most recently the Fair Work Commission, penalty rates have become an important influence on the labour market in Australia. The paper investigates how relevant are the myriad penalty rates to today's social mores and the modern service-based economy. What are the consequences of penalty rates for employment, productivity, profitability and consumer welfare? What would be the impact of their removal? A number of data sources are analysed in the context of the economics of labour markets to answer these questions. The restaurant, cafe and catering industry is used as a specific example to illustrate the effects of penalty rates.","PeriodicalId":41700,"journal":{"name":"Agenda-A Journal of Policy Analysis and Reform","volume":"29 1","pages":"5-26"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2014-11-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83288683","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":"Reflecting on the Growth of Indigenous Self-employment","authors":"B. Hunter","doi":"10.22459/AG.21.01.2014.03","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.22459/AG.21.01.2014.03","url":null,"abstract":"Indigenous self-employment has increased substantially in the last two decades. Government organisations and programs that finance and support the success of Indigenous business provide one explanation for this trend. However, private-sector initiatives also have a role to play. Self-employment is a heterogeneous statistical category that conflates employers with other self-employed who do not employ other workers. Furthermore, it does not take into account the legal status of the business that the owner-manager operates within. Nevertheless, the recent growth in self- employment means that there are enough Indigenous ownermanagers in Australia that future analysis can meaningfully disaggregate census data to gain greater insights into Indigenous business.","PeriodicalId":41700,"journal":{"name":"Agenda-A Journal of Policy Analysis and Reform","volume":"36 1","pages":"45-68"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2014-11-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74806174","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 Plain Truth about Plain Packaging: An Econometric Analysis of the Australian 2011 Tobacco Plain Packaging Act","authors":"S. Davidson, A. Silva","doi":"10.22459/AG.21.01.2014.02","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.22459/AG.21.01.2014.02","url":null,"abstract":"From December 2012 standardised packaging for tobacco products - known as 'plain packaging' - has been mandatory in Australia. This paper evaluates the preliminary evidence - in the form of ABS household expenditure on tobacco data - to establish whether the policy has been successful. Despite our econometric efforts, the data refused to yield any indication this policy has been successful; there is no empirical evidence to support the notion that the plain packaging policy has resulted in lower household expenditure on tobacco than there otherwise would have been. There is some faint evidence to suggest, ceteris paribus, household expenditure on tobacco increased.","PeriodicalId":41700,"journal":{"name":"Agenda-A Journal of Policy Analysis and Reform","volume":"24 1","pages":"27-44"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2014-11-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78652729","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":"Is academic economics withering in Australia","authors":"J. Lodewijks, T. Stokes","doi":"10.22459/AG.21.01.2014.04","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.22459/AG.21.01.2014.04","url":null,"abstract":"Departments of economics in Australia have not fared well recently. Many have been closed, merged or relocated, their staff made redundant while economics degrees and majors have been eliminated. This article tries to understand why academic economics appears to be withering in this country, or at least increasingly concentrated in Group of Eight (Go8) universities, and what if anything can still be done to preserve what is left.","PeriodicalId":41700,"journal":{"name":"Agenda-A Journal of Policy Analysis and Reform","volume":"20 1","pages":"69-90"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2014-11-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81364746","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":"Is Policy Too Important to be Left to Empiricists? Lessons of the 2012 Nobel Prize in Economics","authors":"R. Cornes, J. A. Rodrigues-Neto","doi":"10.22459/AG.20.02.2013.04","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.22459/AG.20.02.2013.04","url":null,"abstract":"Fifty years ago, a paper entitled 'College Admissions and the Stability of Marriage' was published in a somewhat obscure journal, the American Mathematical Monthly (currently a 'B' journal, according to the Australian Business Deans Council). The research program and policy developments that have flowed from that abstract and apparently slight seven-page paper recently led to the award of the 2012 Nobel Prize for Economics to one of its authors, Lloyd Shapley. (Shapley's co-author, David Gale, died in 2008.) Shapley shared the Nobel Prize 'for the theory of stable allocations and the practice of market design' with US economist Alvin Roth, who has been responsible for much of the applied work that has built on Gale and Shapley's insights. The history of the path leading from the abstract Gale/Shapley insights to the design of resource allocation mechanisms in 2012 is a fascinating and instructive one for many reasons. This article tries to give the reader an idea of what this literature is about, and of the many ways in which Matching Theory has led to real improvements in the design of operational resource-allocation mechanisms.","PeriodicalId":41700,"journal":{"name":"Agenda-A Journal of Policy Analysis and Reform","volume":"20 1","pages":"61-76"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2013-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85353884","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":"Excellence in research for Australia: An audit of the applied economics rankings","authors":"S. Davidson","doi":"10.22459/AG.20.02.2013.01","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.22459/AG.20.02.2013.01","url":null,"abstract":"The Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) Report attempts to quantify the quality of research undertaken in Australian universities in the field of 'Applied Economics'. The paper shows it is difficult to reconcile the ERA rankings with the underlying data drawn from the Scopus database. Since the ERA rankings cannot be replicated, and since the ERA process is non-transparent, its rankings should be treated with some caution.","PeriodicalId":41700,"journal":{"name":"Agenda-A Journal of Policy Analysis and Reform","volume":"22 1","pages":"5-20"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2013-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"72840536","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":"Stimulating Savings: An Analysis of Cash Handouts in Australia and the United States","authors":"S. Davidson, A. Silva","doi":"10.22459/AG.20.02.2013.03","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.22459/AG.20.02.2013.03","url":null,"abstract":"At the onset of the Global Financial Crisis governments around the world implemented fiscal stimulus packages. A key component of many of these packages was aimed at stimulating consumer spending. In Australia and the United States, for example, households received one-off cash payments. We assess the changes in the macroeconomic levels of consumption and savings of both countries coinciding with the timing of the household bonuses using an econometric time series method known as seemingly unrelated time-series equations. The results suggest that the one-off cash bonuses did not stimulate consumption. On the contrary, the evidence suggests savings was stimulated.","PeriodicalId":41700,"journal":{"name":"Agenda-A Journal of Policy Analysis and Reform","volume":"4 1","pages":"39-60"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2013-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85039159","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":"A Rejoinder to Biggar","authors":"H. Ergas","doi":"10.22459/AG.20.02.2013.08","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.22459/AG.20.02.2013.08","url":null,"abstract":"First of all, it is illusory to think preventing firms from recouping investments prudently incurred can protect the interests of consumers - the opposite is true. For example, if the regulator, confronted with an adverse cost shock, shifts the burden of that shock on to investors in the regulated business, thus stranding investments prudently made, the effect is simply to increase the risk premium those investors will demand in future. In the long run, that higher premium must be reflected in increased supply costs and so in prices or subsidies, affecting consumers, taxpayers or both. Second, Biggar's suggestion that creating an entity that acts as a consumer representative solves any of the contracting problems I referred to seems inconsistent with both analysis and experience. After all, such an entity still has to identify preferences and aggregate them in a meaningful way; why merely having such a body should make those tasks more tractable is unclear. Moreover, there are obvious issues of governance associated with such entities. The US experience is that they are often captured by self-styled consumer advocates, whose focus ranges from promoting 'green' schemes (despite their higher costs) to a naive form of populism. I would suggest that has also been the Australian experience with consumer advocates in telecommunications. Third, just as regulators are not like central banks, so regulators are neither courts nor judges, for reasons explored in Ergas (2009). Precisely because the regulatory task is relatively loosely defined and relies on the collection and analysis of a wide range of information (and so requires a permanent bureaucracy), it cannot be shoehorned into the constraints we impose on courts. Those constraints, which minimise the opportunities for courts to be 'captured' or to themselves engage in rent-seeking, include severe restrictions on the manner in which information is presented (embodied in the law of evidence and in the rules of proceeding), the nature of the interaction between the court and the parties and the complex structure of appeals. In contrast, economic regulators are generally subject only to the fairly permissive requirements of","PeriodicalId":41700,"journal":{"name":"Agenda-A Journal of Policy Analysis and Reform","volume":"142 1","pages":"111-112"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2013-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79614281","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":"'Why Johnny Can't Regulate': A Reply to Ergas","authors":"D. Biggar","doi":"10.22459/AG.20.02.2013.07","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.22459/AG.20.02.2013.07","url":null,"abstract":"Henry Ergas is a talented, erudite and articulate economist, and a long-time critic of the ACCC/AER. In a recent paper in this journal2 he raises the possibility that public utility regulation is doomed to end in failure. He draws on the vignette of primary-schooler Johnny, who wants to grow up to be a regulator. Is Johnny's career destined to end up with nothing but disappointment?Of course, this raises the question as to what public utility regulation is designed to achieve. Ergas addresses this issue at the outset, by allowing that, due to transactions costs, a Coasean bargain contract between the customers and a monopoly supplier would be subject to the risk of ex-post opportunism - both on the side of the supplier (who might threaten to shade quality or raise the price ex-post) and on the side of the customers (who might seek to expropriate the sunk investment of the supplier by collectively agreeing to lower the price to the supplier). Given these risks, either side may fail to make valuable sunk investments, or, as Ergas puts it, either side may make investments which are inefficient due to the threat of opportunism: 'each side would invest in costly precautions so as to ward them off. But ... those investments, seen from a societal perspective, are merely a waste, reducing welfare.\"3Ergas is thereby led to ask: can the government directly step in to re-create the Coasean bargain on behalf of small customers? He rightly points out many problems in this, including problems of aggregating customer preferences, problems of monitoring and enforcing by customers of the government in its interactions with the supplier, and problems of time-inconsistency and opportunism.Perhaps these problems can be resolved by delegating certain powers to an independent authority. Such delegation might make it easier for customers to monitor, might improve the information-collection ability, and might resolve the commitment problems. After all, delegating monetary policy to an independent central bank as a means of overcoming the time-inconsistency problem has been a success. Might not the same principle apply to an independent regulatory authority? Ergas goes to some lengths to distinguish the role of a central bank from the role of an independent regulator. According to Ergas, an economic regulator is likely to have much wider range of instruments at its disposal and more vaguely specified objectives. Moreover, the incentives for time- inconsistency are much stronger for a regulator than for a central bank. He also suggests that newly established central banks seek to invest in a reputation for being tough on inflation, whereas newly established regulators seem to do the opposite:This [need to establish a reputation] would suggest that the initial period following the transition to regulatory independence would be associated with regulator's credibly signalling a strong aversion to expropriating sunk investments. But in no major country has that been the case ","PeriodicalId":41700,"journal":{"name":"Agenda-A Journal of Policy Analysis and Reform","volume":"5 4 1","pages":"105-110"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2013-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78089290","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 Power to Tax, 33 years later","authors":"J. Pincus","doi":"10.22459/AG.20.02.2013.06","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.22459/AG.20.02.2013.06","url":null,"abstract":"The basic puzzle about the power to tax is how to limit the capacity of government to exploit taxpayers, while at the same time not overly hampering the government in going about its useful activities. Standard economics fondly believes that it is giving advice to benevolent despots as to how to collect a given target of tax revenue at the least possible harm to the size of the economic pie. The Constitutional Political Economy approach of Geoff Brennan and Jim Buchanan showed that that very same advice is exactly what the non-benevolent government wants to hear in its efforts to maximise tax revenue. Brennan and Buchanan were concerned about excessive exploitation of taxpayers in the large; standard economics is concerned with second- order small triangles of economic inefficiency; government is concerned about the size of first-order revenue rectangles: and so should we be.","PeriodicalId":41700,"journal":{"name":"Agenda-A Journal of Policy Analysis and Reform","volume":"50 1","pages":"89-104"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2013-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85805519","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}