Real Wages in Australia and Canada, 1870–1913: Globalization versus Productivity

Australia's and Canada's real wage experiences between 1870 and 1913 were distinctive. Faster productivity growth underpinned Canada's overtaking of Australia's wage levels. The globalization forces of migration and trade also shaped their comparative wages, principally by reducing wage growth in Canada. Immigration increased slightly Australia's real wages, but reduced wage levels in Canada, and tempered there the beneficial effects of rising productivity and improving terms of trade. In contrast, wage earners' share of national income rose after 1890 in Australia, with the productivity slowdown hitting chiefly rents and profits. Distributional shifts favouring wage earners in Australia, and the depressing effects of mass immigration on wages in Canada, limited Canada's wage lead before 1914, despite her faster productivity growth.     

Communication about a communication technology

As genetically modified (GM) products approach the market stage, the UK government and agro-food industry have faced a suspicious or hostile public. Since 1998 many retail chains have undertaken to exclude any GM-derived ingredients from their own-brand lines. This commercial blockage has intensified pressures for greater precaution, even for a moratorium on cultivating GM crops. Political protest has led to strategies for precautionary commercialization. Government and industry have cooperated to plan a ‘managed development’ of GM crops. Across the agricultural supply chain, industry has devised voluntary guidelines to ensure segregation of GM crops and to limit the spread of GM herbicide-tolerance. In particular UK regulators seek to test the risk that broad-spectrum herbicide sprays could damage wildlife habitats; they have broadened the advisory expertise accordingly. These measures open up the precautionary content to further debate, at both national and EU levels. Market-stage precautions establish a means to test claims that GM crops are environmentally-friendly products. By translating public concerns into broader risk-assessment criteria, the UK procedure involves critics in potentially influencing standards of scientific evidence and environmental harm. This social process has become a prerequisite for legitimizing commercial use.     

Globalization and real wages in New Zealand 1873-1913

This paper reports annual real wage indexes for laborers and for workers more generally in New Zealand, adjusted for purchasing power parity, for the years 1873-1913. These data are used to include New Zealand in the debates surrounding international wage convergence. On the basis of time series tests we find evidence of an integrated trans-Tasman labor market. Productivity, the terms of trade, and swings in labor’s income share, rather than immigration, shaped New Zealand’s wage growth.     

REFRIGERATION AND DISTRIBUTION: NEW ZEALAND LAND PRICES AND REAL WAGES 1873–1939

The responses in New Zealand to the opportunities of refrigeration transformed farming in the Dominion during the half-century from 1890. Closer settlement and the extension of the cultivated area combined with more intensive farming methods to increase land productivity and real gross domestic product capita to the extent that living standards in New Zealand measured by the Human Development Index ranked first in the world by 1913. In contrast, real wages in the Dominion stagnated. The refrigeration-related trade boom had powerful income distribution effects that increased sharply the land rental–wage ratio during the years to 1920. Widely diffuse land ownership in New Zealand tempered the rise in income inequality, to set the Dominion apart from other land-abundant economies of the periphery.     

Geographical Information Systems, Spatial Analysis and Public Policy: the British Experience

Geographic information systems (GIS) have received considerable academic and practitioner attention in the last ten years. It is our view that these tools have been considerably oversold to public sector organisations-particularly local government-many of whom have failed to achieve the benefits they expected. In our paper, we attempt to develop a broad definition of GIS and discuss the relationship between GIS and policy analysis, spatial decision support systems, spatial analysis and spatial modelling. We also seek to explore how GIS fits into the management information systems and information architectures of public sector organisations and examine some of the human and organisational tensions which GIS adoption and use have brought about. Where possible, we have used examples of how GIS has been used to inform public development in several areas though these have generally been in academic settings and not in public sector organisations.