Introducing ‘Journeys Home’

Homelessness, despite being a major social policy issue in Australia, is an area that is not well served by data. Most sorely lacking is any large‐scale panel study that follows a broad sample of persons with recent experience of homelessness and unstable housing histories. In 2010, the Australian Government set about rectifying this deficiency when it commissioned the Melbourne Institute to undertake a new panel study, now known as ‘Journeys Home’. This study draws its sample from the population of Centrelink income‐support recipients, targeting persons identified in the administrative data as having recent experience of homelessness, as well as others with similar characteristics who may be vulnerable to housing difficulties in the future. This article summarises the design of this new study and reports on fieldwork outcomes from the first two waves of data collection.     

A Sectoral Approach Balancing Global Efficiency and Equity

This paper explores the idea that a properly designed sectoral approach could be the answer to two sets of constraints that hinder international agreements on climate change, namely a genuine concern from developing countries for economic growth and competitiveness issues from industrialized countries. Our sectoral approach builds on three premises: (i) cap-and-trade systems are established in industrialized countries and intensity targets in developing countries, (ii) sectors subject to international trade abide by the rules of the countries in which they trade and (iii) a fraction of the revenues from permits in industrialized countries go towards carbon mitigation in developing countries. We design an economic model that features interactions in three carbon-intensive sectors (two of which are internationally traded) and two countries (an industrialized country and a developing country). Two scenarios are constructed: an Enhanced Sectoral Approach, which refers to our proposal, and a Global Cap, which implements a uniform CO₂ price. We compare the two scenarios in terms of total welfare and equity. It is shown that, for a minor global welfare loss, the Enhanced Sectoral Approach ranks high in terms of equity for emerging countries. This approach also eliminates competitiveness and leakage issues.