The purpose of this study is to apply empirically the regional income convergence for a set of six Turkic Republics of the former Soviet Union, viz. Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. These countries ranked among the least developed centrally planned economies, and there are significant inter-country differences. For example, Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan, being oil and gas producers, had a significant growth during the last decade, but they are also transition economies in the midst of transforming their economies after decades of centrally controlled economic planning under the Soviet system. The research question analysed here is whether these Turkic Asian economies share a significant convergence experience since independence from the Soviet Union. Two kinds of convergence in these six transition economics are examined: beta convergence of incomes and sigma convergence of institutional convergence. The results demonstrate empirical evidence of beta income convergence, especially in the resource-rich republics of Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan, while the sigma convergence is uniformly lacking suggesting institutional divergence. Accordingly, beta convergence of incomes is rather superficial as it is not supported by evidence of institutional and policy efficiency captured by sigma convergence.

A tough fiscal stance has become the norm for discouraging tobacco consumption. Tax and excise rises serve to increase the price of licit relative to illicit tobacco. Consequently, there has been a rise in black market tobacco consumption. This article investigates the degree of substitution between licit and illicit tobacco using novel survey data. We find that illicit tobacco smokers are sensitive to the price ratio between licit and illicit tobacco. This implies that high tobacco taxes have spillover effects that need to be accounted for in policy evaluation.

This paper empirically tests the association between recently adopted state-level clean indoor air laws and the smoking behaviour of Mexican men and women. To deal with the problem of highly correlated policies across venues, I construct an index of clean indoor air policies that measures the degree of strictness of smoking restrictions in different locations and the level of enforcement of the laws. Matching policies to individual-level data from the National Health Survey 2006, I find that more comprehensive laws are not associated with the decision to smoke, but are negatively related to daily consumption of cigarettes by men. More specifically, a one unit increase in the index is associated with 3.9 fewer cigarettes smoked a day. The results that test for policy endogeneity show that states with higher intensity of smoking were not more or less likely to pass more comprehensive laws, which suggests that restrictive clean indoor air policies might have been effective at reducing the number of cigarettes smoked by Mexican men who smoke.

Demand for water is inelastic. As a consequence of this, the prospective returns to supply augmentation of urban water may vary widely with seasonal conditions, population growth and water savings over time. Prolonged drought conditions in the first decade of the new millennium placed urban water supplies under stress. Substantial investments followed to augment the water supplies of each of Australia's mainland state capitals. Present judgements on whether the investments in individual cities were justified may be driven by current seasonal conditions rather than longer term analysis of supply and demand.

This paper discusses the development of learning standards in higher education economics in Australia. The motivation is twofold. The creation of Tertiary Education Quality Standards Agency in 2011, along with the revised Australian Qualifications Framework specifications published in July 2011, have given the learning standards agenda a new impetus in Australia. Work has been done overseas on learning standards in economics through the UK Benchmarking Statement and the OECD's Assessment of Higher Education Learning Outcomes study. However, a key finding from learning standards projects in Australia in other disciplines is that the Australian academic community needs to take ownership of the standards agenda as a pre-condition for general acceptance and successful implementation. Second, the development of learning standards in economics is an opportunity to drive an evidence-based process of curriculum renewal, including critical reflection on core knowledge, skills and assessment methods.

I estimate a household demand system with specific focus on allocation to children, adults and joint household goods. The main finding is that marginal dollars are spent disproportionately on adult-assignable goods relative to the way in which the average dollar is spent. The estimation provides both income effects and a complete set of cross-price effects, which informs analysis both of income transfers and of policies that induce relative price changes. Contrasted with earlier work, the demand system in this paper covers nearly all household expenditures. I show bias that results from reduced-form systems.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the relevance of the citation-based “h-” and “g-” indexes as a means for measuring research output in economics. This study is unique in that it is the first to utilise the “h-” and “g-”indexes in the context of a time-limited evaluation period and to provide comprehensive coverage of all academic economists in all university-based economics departments within a nation state. For illustration purposes, we have selected the New Zealand's Performance-Based Research Fund (PBRF) as our evaluation scheme. To provide a frame of reference for “h-” and “g-”index-output measures, we have also estimated research output using a number of journal-based weighting schemes. In general, our findings suggest that “h-” and “g-”index scores are strongly associated with low-powered journal ranking schemes and weakly associated with high powered journal weighting schemes. More specifically, we found the “h-” and “g-”indexes to suffer from a lack of differentiation: for example, 52 per cent of all participants received a score of zero under both measures, and 92 and 89 per cent received scores of two or less under “h-” and “g-” respectively. Overall, our findings suggest that “h-” and “g-”indexes should not be incorporated into a PBRF-like framework.

This short note estimates using the Kmenta's (1967) approximation, a constant elasticity of substitution (CES) production function for Australia for 1960–2004. It is found that the elasticity of substitution is 2.44, technical progress is capital augmenting and the steady-state growth rate (SSGR) of Australia is about 0.34%.

One calculation used in Australia for housing stress is that a household spends more than 30 per cent of their income on housing costs and they are in the bottom two quintiles of the income distribution. One problem with this measure is that a household is either in housing stress, or not in housing stress. This article extends work by Chaplin and Freeman on the depth of housing stress to include a 30/40 measure. This article also explores how different groups of households have different levels of housing stress, and different depths of housing stress, and why these may diverge. Depth of housing stress is compared by age group; housing tenure and over time. Finally, conclusions and implications for Government policy are suggested.

In this article, we explore the historical evolution of social welfare policy in sub-Saharan Africa focusing on the post-1900 period. We show that we have seen a very conflicted approach to social development. Social security was reluctantly and very slowly introduced during the colonial period, and the post-colonial state has likewise been cautious in its approach and has not been able to build a long-term social contract with society. Instead, it has relied on clientelism, cooption, coercion and patronage. Since the late 1990s we have seen the African state and political systems begin to mature with greater democratisation and the growth of formal welfare systems.

This article presents a set of microsimulation models to derive individual companies' tax data from their time series financial microdata by applying different tax offset restrictions. Based on this model, we develop a Markov chain model for simulating 1828 non-financial German companies in the Amadeus database to assess the impact of major reforms on German tax offset restrictions since 2001. Main results suggest that: (i) our developed Markov model is able to rather accurately predict the probabilities of a company's taxable profits (losses) in different levels; (ii) the introduction of more strict offsetting rules provides incentive for companies to provide less losses and become more conservative in their business operations; and (iii) the reforms have particularly important impacts on large and very large enterprises and on some sectors such as electricity, gas and water supply, construction and whole sale and retail trade.

This paper examines the interaction between consumption and the price/return of stocks. In so doing, we utilise an advanced theoretical and empirical framework. It is worth noting that previous literature used simple linear regressions without a rigorous theoretical basis. Consequently, we present a sophisticated non-linear dynamic model as the theoretical basis of our empirical results.