The price elasticity of demand for pharmaceuticals amongst high-income older Australians: a natural experiment

Most high-income older Australians became eligible for a pharmaceutical concession through a 1999 policy change. I exploit this natural experiment to estimate their price elasticity of demand for pharmaceuticals. The preferred model is a nonlinear Instrumental Variable (IV) regression, estimated on nationally representative repeated cross-sectional survey data using the Generalized Method of Moments (GMM). No significant evidence is found for endogenous take-up, and so cross-sectional estimates are also considered. Taking all of the results into account, the ‘headline’ estimate is ?0.1, implying that quantity demanded is not highly responsive to price.     

A three-sector model for real property tax incedence

This article presents a new three-sector general-equilibrium model for tax incidence analysis. The model differs from the usual two-sector model not only in the addition of an extra sector but also in abandoning the classical tradition of specifying with capital and labor arguments. The property tax in the model is specified as a partial tax applying to real — but not to personal — property used in the production of housing services and other goods.The model is quantified by selecting numerical values for its parameters in order to estimate percentage changes in the endogenous variables caused by the introduction of an exogenous property tax. The major effect of the tax is to make real property relatively more expensive and to cause less real property to be produced.     

The Singapore Ministerial Conference: An Overview

The guest editor, Peter Lloyd, outlines the scope of the Singapore Ministerial meeting of the WTO and assesses its achievements and disappointments.     

Qualitative aspects of the Indian growth spurt of the 1980s

The Indian growth spurt of the 1980s has led DeLong (2003), Rodrik & Subramaniam (IMF Staff Papers 52(2):193–228, 2005) and Kohli (Economic and Political Weekly 41(14):1361–1370, 2006) to question the need for market reforms in the 1990s and the supporters of liberalization to argue that it was the result of piecemeal liberalization. Both sides of this debate focus exclusively on the quantitative aspects of the high growth while ignoring its underlying quality. This paper analyzes two aspects of the quality of growth during the 1980s. First, it considers whether the increases in production were concentrated in goods far removed from mass consumption and second, it analyzes certain characteristics of three consumer goods that serve as an indicator of their quality.     

The effect of institutional quality on firm export performance in emerging economies: a contingency model of firm age and size

It is widely accepted that countries with sound formal and informal institutions create more robust environments for firm performance. However, due to the liabilities faced by firms without available slack and/or market power, we contend that institutions are especially important for new and small firms. Unfortunately, there is little research examining the potential moderating effect of firm size or age on the relationship between institutional quality and export performance. In response, we hypothesize that institutional quality will be more important to increasing the export performance of new and small firms compared with their large, established counterparts. We test our hypotheses using data from the World Bank’s World Business Environment Survey. The results of our analyses offer support for our model, although some institutional variables appear to be more important to export performance than others. We conclude by discussing the implications of our results.     

Fuzzy Set Based Consensus Schemes for Multicriteria Group Decision making Applied to Strategic Planning

This paper studies three consensus schemes based on fuzzy models for dealing with the input of multiple experts in multicriteria decision making. The consensus schemes are based on different aggregation procedures for constructing a collective decision. In the paper, we propose a methodology that makes use of the three consensus schemes implemented by a coordination mode that creates an efficient manner of exploiting the capabilities of each member of the group in a cooperative work. The applicability and efficiency of the proposed methodology is demonstrated through an application related to strategic planning.