Optimal Commodity Taxes in Australia

The recent changes to commodity taxes in Australia have led to renewed interest in a classic question in public finance: should the tax rates be uniform or differentiated? This article attempts to answer this question by calculating optimal commodity taxes in Australia for a nine‐item disaggregation. The estimates point to non‐uniform commodity taxes, even from the viewpoint of an inequality‐insensitive tax planner. The optimal commodity taxes bear little resemblance with the pre‐GST or post‐GST tax rates. No less significant is our observation that even the purely efficiency‐driven optimal commodity taxes imply lower real expenditure inequality than the actual taxes.     

The Four Umpires: A Paradigm for Ethical Leadership

Theories of leadership have traditionally focused on leadership traits, styles, and situational factors that influence leader behaviors. We propose that The Four Umpires Model described herein, which examines how four leadership types view reality and perception, provides a useful example of an effective steward leader. We use the Five Beliefs Model identified by Edgar Schein and Peter Senge to frame the implicit assumptions underlying the core beliefs and mental models of each of the four umpires. We suggest that the stewardship model of Umpire Number Four, the Facilitating Idealist, is the best model for leadership of the four umpires described. In our review of the Four Umpires Model we also explain why it is importance for every leader to thoughtfully assess the assumptions that form the ethical basis for leadership decisions and actions.     

Bayesian inference for the gravity model

This paper seeks to empirically extend the gravity model, which has been widely used to analyze volumes of trade between pairs of countries. We generalize the basic threshold tobit model by allowing for the inclusion of country‐specific effects into the analysis and also show how one can explore the relationship between trade volumes and a given covariate via a non‐parametric approach. We use our derived methodology to investigate the impact of a particular aspect of institutions—the enforcement of contracts—on bilateral trade. We find that contract enforcement matters in predicting trade volumes for all types of goods, that it matters most for the trade of differentiated goods, and that the relationship between contract enforcement and trade in our threshold tobit exhibits some nonlinearities. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

East European aid to India

The aid-relationship is part of a wider economic relationship between India and the East European countries, in a far more integrated sense than is the case with some of India's other donors. The group has been a significant though not a dominant source of aid to India, the USSR being the most important member of the group. Easy generalizations about the terms of East European aid, in comparison to aid from other sources, are not possible. The same is true for India's experience in the actual utilization of aid from various sources. The main usefulness of the East European countries as a source of aid has lain in their willingness to give aid for particular public-sector projects and in improving India's bargaining powers vis-à-vis other donors.     

Demographic variables in demand systems: The case for generality

This paper provides evidence in favour of greater generality in the demographic demand literature. We propose two demographic demand procedures. One extends the Gorman model by allowing non additive interaction between overheads and Barten scaling. The other extends Price Scaling, by allowing the equivalence scale to vary with utility, and offers a test of Equivalence Scale Exactness (ESE). The rejection of ESE is robust to the assumed demand functional forms (RNLPS, QAIDS), to items chosen, and the estimation method (MLE, GMM). The results show that published cell averages yield well determined estimates of the demographic generalisation parameters.This paper was written during my visit to the UBC in Vancouver, Canada in 1992/93. I am grateful to two anonymous referees for their helpful remarks on an earlier version. The disclaimer applies.     

School Attainment, Completion, and Economic Development: A Cross-Country Analysis

The primary aim of this paper is to examine the relationship between school attainment, school completion, and economic development. In doing so it also examines the effect of other macroeconomic variables on school attainment and completion. Estimation is conducted using a panel dataset of 138 countries. Our results show that income levels, government expenditure on education, and political instability all have significant effects on school completion and attainment. In addition these variables have different effects on male and female schooling. Our results have important policy implications and in particular allow policymakers to identify different instruments to target the problem of non‐completion of schooling.     

A Comparison of Income and Expenditure Inequality Estimates: The Australian Evidence, 1975–76 to 1993–94

Using Australian unit record data this paper compares income and expenditure inequalities over the period 1975–76 to 1993–94. The study finds inconsistencies between the two inequality movements over much of this period. We also observe differences in the nature of income and consumption disparities. Both approaches show that the 'within group' inequality dominates the 'between group' component when the population is divided into household types. The inequality estimates are sensitive to the equivalence scale used as the household size deflator but not to the cost of living index used as the price deflator.     

Dietary Diversity,Food Security and Undernourishment: The Vietnamese Evidence*

As is widely known, Vietnam experienced a rise in living standards and a decline in expenditure poverty during the first half of the 1990s. This paper extends this knowledge by providing evidence on the Vietnamese experience of food security, undernourishment and poverty from the late 1990s to the early part of the new millennium. The results suggest that poor households did not experience increases in food consumption, calorie intake and dietary diversity of the same magnitude as non‐poor households. Nevertheless, Vietnam experienced impressive reductions in both calorie deprivation and expenditure poverty at the turn of the century. Non‐poor households, in particular, experienced spectacular increases in calorie intake and dietary diversity during the period 1997/1998–2004. This paper also reports regression results which point to the role of urbanization and improvement in education levels in promoting dietary diversity and nutrient intake. The present study finds evidence of sharp regional differences in calorie intake and calorie costs, which suggests that the authorities should set provincial poverty lines, contrary to the current practice adopted by Vietnam's General Statistical Office.     

Model assisted survey sampling strategy in two phases

Postulating a super-population regression model connecting a size variable, a cheaply measurable variable and an expensively observable variable of interest, an asymptotically optimal double sampling strategy to estimate the survey population total of the third variable is specified. To render it practicable, unknown model-parameters in the optimal estimator are replaced by appropriate statistics. The resulting generalized regression estimator is then shown to have a model-cum-asymptotic design based expected square error equal to that of the asymptotically optimum estimator itself. An estimator for design variance of the estimator is also proposed.