How Useful Is the Genuine Savings Rate as a Sustainability Indicator for Regions within Countries? Australia and Queensland Compared

This article shows how macroeconomic indicators of sustainable development can be applied to the Queensland economy. While recognising the complex and contentious theoretical and practical issues in deriving the Genuine Savings Rate (GSR) to serve as such an indicator, we use the World Bank's methodology, which includes only mineral depletion, deforestation and carbon dioxide emissions as environmental terms, to estimate GSRs for Queensland for the period 1989 to 1999, and compare these to World Bank estimates of Australia's GSR for the same period. We find that Queensland has a higher rate of natural resource depletion and a lower GSR than the whole of Australia. We also examine how well the World Bank GSR performs as a ‘headline’ measure of overall sustainability, review criticisms of the GSR, and compare its implicit policy implications with those of net state savings, and of the GSR plus a suite of other indicators.     

Learning Why More Learning Takes Place in Some Classrooms Than Others

Abstract. The relatively poor average performance of German students on the recent PISA international evaluations of 15- and 16-year-olds' literary skills (2000) and mathematical skills (2003) and the wide variation in performance, with low-income students scoring particularly poorly, have led to calls for reforms of the German educational system. Understanding why students in some classrooms learn more than do those in other classrooms is an important first step in considering alternative reform strategies. Possible explanations include differences in teacher quality, class sizes and peer groups, and also differences among the types of secondary schools that parents select for their children. This paper illustrates a set of techniques that are useful in examining the roles these factors play in predicting why, net of family background and prior achievement, the average achievement of children in some classrooms is much higher than that of children in other classrooms. We illustrate the use of these techniques with a dataset from Bogotá, Colombia, that has two attractive properties. First, some teachers teach multiple classes of students. Second, students are enrolled in schools in two sectors (public and private). Application of the techniques described in this paper could shed light on the reasons why the average academic achievement of German students attending some schools is much higher than that of German students attending other schools.     

The hydroelectricity consumption and economic growth in Asian countries - evidence using an asymmetric cointegration approach

ABSTRACT

This study examines the four commonly tested hypotheses in hydroelectricity consumption – economic growth literature for 12 Asian countries. Our results from a recently developed hidden cointegration technique uncover rich and significant relationships between negative and positive components of the variables under consideration. In particular, we find evidence to support the neutrality hypothesis in five countries (Bangladesh, Indonesia, Pakistan, Philippines, and Thailand), the growth hypothesis in four countries (India, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan), and both growth and conservation hypotheses in three countries (China, Malaysia, and New Zealand). These findings suggest that appropriate economic policies should be elaborated on the basis of the country’s specific hydroelectricity consumption–growth nexus. Finally, our new evidence suggests that the lack of stable relationship between hydroelectricity consumption and economic growth documented in previous studies for some of these countries could be due to the failure to properly account for the nonlinearity property in the data.     

Academic Economic Opinion in East Asia

Surveys of economists' opinions have been reported from around the world over the past two decades, but never (as far as we are aware) from a non-Western country. This article presents the results of our survey of academic economists drawn from ten East Asian nations. Respondents gave their views on a number of economic propositions ranging across issues of deregulation, government business enterprises, micro-economic and labour market reform, income distribution, and attitudes to the market. Finally, the article reports the results of multidimensional scaling techniques which were used to compare the attitudes of East Asian academic economists toward the market with those of their international colleagues. Overall, we found that while our colleagues in Asia make some allowances for circumstances unique to fast-growing developing economies, their predilection toward market solutions to economic problems reflects that of their (predominantly) Western training. Economists in the ‘Tiger’ nations (Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan and South Korea) more closely reflect the views of colleagues in the market-friendly West (especially North America, Australia and Germany) than do economists in the newly emerging (‘non-Tiger’) nations such as Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia and the Philippines.     

Value and exchange: Two windows for economic theorizing

This essay introduces a symposium on value and exchange as alternative organizing concepts for the pursuit of economic theorizing. These concepts pertain to two distinct conceptual windows through which economic phenomena can be examined. The immediate inspiration for this symposium was the articulation of Kohn (2004) of the distinction, a distinction that, in turn, was central to the articulation of Buchanan (1964). Furthermore, this distinction is central to the divergent orientations toward economic theorizing that were set forth in the early 1870s by Carl Menger (1971) and Léon Walras (1874).     

Accident Compensation Reform

The aim of the article is to provide a survey of the major issues involved in the reform of accident Compensation schemes. The article outlines the economic and social pressures for reform of existing accident compensation schemes, discusses the major reform issues and raises the major challenges facing the reform process. The article focuses on the experience of the Victorian Government in developing and implementing its reform of workers compensation (Workcare) and on its proposed reform of the existing compulsory third party motor accidents scheme to illustrate the key issues.     

Development of Habitat Suitability Criteria and In‐Stream Habitat Assessment for the Benthic Cyanobacteria Phormidium

Global demand for freshwater has led to unprecedented levels of water abstraction from riverine systems. This has resulted in large alterations in natural river flows. The deleterious impacts of reduced flows on fish and macroinvertebrate abundances have been thoroughly investigated; in contrast, there is a limited understanding of the potential for changes in the abundance of nuisance benthic algal/cyanobacterial blooms. In New Zealand, Phormidium sp. blooms are common in numerous rivers during summer low flows. In this study, an in‐stream habitat assessment is used to examine the relationship between Phormidium habitat availability and reducing flows. Over 650 observations of Phormidium mats, from seven sites (Hutt River, lower North Island, New Zealand), were used to construct habitat suitability curves for depth, velocity and substrate. Preference curves were fitted using both the ‘forage ratio’ and ‘quantile regression’ methods. Phormidium growth, observed at all seven sites, increased significantly from upstream (uppermost site, 5.2% mat cover) to downstream (63.5%). The habitat suitability curves revealed Phormidium had a large tolerance to velocity, depth and substrate type. Consequently, decreases in flow had only negligible effects on available Phormidium habitat. During periods of stable flow, Phormidium abundance positively correlated with increased nitrogen concentrations, potentially explaining the large variation in Phormidium cover from upstream to downstream. Quantile regression generated habitat suitability criteria were a more accurate predictor of available Phormidium habitat than the forage ratio criteria. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Application of flow cytometry for examining phytoplankton succession in two eutrophic lakes

Flow cytometry has potential as a rapid assessment technique to evaluate phytoplankton biomass and species composition. It facilitates for multi-parameter analysis of individual cells on the basis of light scattering effects induced from cellular constituents, as well as auto-fluorescence. Fluorescence emission characteristics may be especially useful in classifying cyanobacteria as they contain phycoerythrin which emits light predominantly in the 550-600 nm waveband, chlorophyll-a (650-700 nm emission) and allophycocyanin (660 nm emission). The objective of our study was to assess the utility of flow cytometry for the rapid identification and sorting of freshwater algae and cyanobacteria species. Using a selection of laboratory-cultured freshwater algae and cyanobacteria species, this study demonstrated unique light scatter and fluorescent characteristics for each species examined, allowing for rapid species identification and sorting of mixed populations of laboratory cultures and samples from two lakes in the Rotorua region (New Zealand). Analysis of lake water samples collected over seven months demonstrated changes in abundance and community composition of phytoplankton in the two lakes and demonstrates that flow cytometry may be a useful technique for examining seasonal changes in phytoplankton composition.