Economics - Research Publications
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ItemNo Preview AvailableThe Doha agenda and development prospects for intellectual property rights reform(Asian Development Bank, 2002)At the World Trade Organization Ministerial Conference in Doha, a number of key declarations were made that will directly impact the operation of the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS). These declarations perform a multidimensional function: clarifying and reiterating existing rights and obligations, as well as setting out a negotiating agenda. By providing clarity on a number of critical issues, the Doha Ministerial Conference attempted to clear the way for future work on TRIPS. Overall, the Doha Declarations with respect to the TRIPS Agreement are seen as a major step for developing (and particularly the least developed) countries towards securing flexibility in the use of intellectual property rights (IPRs), especially with respect to public health issues. Specifically, the Declaration on the TRIPS Agreement and Public Health helps to ensure that in situations where a national emergency has to be dealt with, the set of options is not limited by the architecture of international IPRs. More generally, it reiterates the ability of countries to interpret the TRIPS Agreement in a way that is beneficial to them or reflective of their needs. The right to exercise flexibility over IPRs has historically been available to countries during their industrializing phase. While the TRIPS Agreement does limit the flexibility a country has, much work has attempted to emphasize the scope for discretion a country has in the design of its IPR system. The results of the Doha Ministerial Conference can be seen as an attempt to further stress the flexibility within the TRIPS Agreement.
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ItemDiscrete hours labour supply modelling: Specification, estimation and simulation(John Wiley & Sons, 2005)The assumption behind discrete hours labour supply modelling is that utility-maximising individuals choose from a relatively small number of hours levels, rather than being able to vary hours worked continuously. Such models are becoming widely used in view of their substantial advantages, compared with a continuous hours approach, when estimating and their role in tax policy microsimulation. This paper provides an introduction to the basic analytics of discrete hours labour supply modelling. Special attention is given to model specification, maximum likelihood estimation and microsimulation of tax reforms. The analysis is at each stage illustrated by the use of numerical examples. At the end, an empirical example of a hypothetical policy change to the social security system is given to illustrate the role of discrete hours microsimulation in the analysis of tax and transfer policy changes.
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ItemGlobal challenges for land administration and sustainable development( 2006)An important government activity of all nation states is building and maintaining a land administration system (LAS) with the primary objective of supporting an efficient and effective land market. This includes cadastral surveys to identify and subdivide land, land registry systems to support simple land trading (buying, selling, mortgaging and leasing land) and land information systems to facilitate access to the relevant information, increasingly through an Internet enabled e-government environment. For most countries a cadastre is at the core of the LAS providing spatial integrity and unique land parcel identification in support of security of tenure and effective land trading. For many cadastral and land administration officials and for much of society, these are the primary, and in many cases the only roles of the cadastre and LAS. However the role, and particularly the potential of LAS and their core cadastres, have rapidly expanded over the last couple of decades and will continue to change in the future. But what is a land market in a modern economy? Since our LAS were developed, land commodities and trading patterns have undergone substantial changes: they have become complex, corporatised and international. Are our current LAS designed to support a modern land market that trades in complex commodities such as mortgage backed certificates, water rights, land information, time shares, unit and property trusts, resource rights, financial instruments, insurance products, options, corporate development instruments and vertical villages? Modern land markets involve a complex and dynamic range of activities, processes and opportunities, and are impacted upon by a wide range of restrictions and responsibilities imposed on land especially since WW II. These restrictions are continually evolving, primarily in response to economic, energy and sustainable development objectives. They are equally being driven by developments in information and communications techn
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ItemIslamic religious education and the debate on itsreform post-September 11(University of New South Wales Press, 2005)The place of Islam and Muslims in the West has been a source of much debate in the post-September 11 era, not least in the area of Islamic education – an area seen by some Western commentators as a major source of anti-Western attitudes, and a breeding ground for terrorism. Such simplistic views of Islamic religious educational systems and institutions ignore the complex history of Islamic education and the diverse forms that it has taken across different times, places and cultures. This chapter from the book Islam and the West: Reflections from Australia explores the development of Islamic religious education over time, tracing its growth and decline in the pre-modern period and moves towards reform in the modern era. This is followed by a discussion of the generally simplistic perception, held particularly among Western commentators post-September 11, 2001, that Islamic religious education is closely linked to terrorism. Saeed notes that the hijackers involved in the 2001 attacks were not graduates of traditional Islamic education, a fact overlooked by many commentators. Although many prominent Muslim academics and scholars have been working to reform Islamic education over the past century, Saeed argues that these efforts may well have been hindered rather than helped by the authoritarian and coercive forms of reform which are being called for by some commentators in the West. In fact, the war on terror may well be the biggest stumbling block to the reform of Islamic religious education.
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ItemCreating a culture of human rights from a Muslim perspective(Multi-Faith Centre, Griffith University, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia, 2006)In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, issues of human rights have drawn an increasing amount of international attention. Some people view traditional understandings of Islamic law, particularly in areas such as gender rights and freedom of religion, as contradicting values accepted by many today as universal human rights. In response to this view, Abdullah Saeed examines the ideas of human dignity and the importance of context in understanding Islamic law as it relates to the creation of a culture of human rights from a Muslim perspective. This paper, presented in 2005 at the international symposium Cultivating Wisdom, Harvesting Peace at Griffith University, Brisbane, argues that it is necessary to recognize and highlight the fact that many human rights, which are seen today as universal, may well be supported by the foundation texts of Islam. Saeed explores the importance of contextualizing Islamic laws in order to understand their intended meaning; the need to reinterpret traditional understandings which appear to conflict with today’s human rights; and the interpretative and practical possibilities found in foundational texts and the tradition of Islamic thought which can be drawn on to formulate a philosophy of human rights in the modern period.
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ItemThe need to rethink apostasy laws(Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2004)Recent high-profile cases and a number of Muslim scholars affirming the death penalty for apostasy have brought the issue of the pre-modern Islamic law of apostasy (riddah) back to the fore. Once largely ignored, apostasy is today vigorously debated among Muslims. The Qur’anic concept of non-coercion in religion was interpreted narrowly by pre-modern Islamic scholars, and excluded the right to convert away from Islam. In this chapter from the book Freedom of Religion, Apostasy and Islam, Saeed observes that this was a reasonable conclusion in the pre-modern context, when religious identity was enmeshed with political affiliation, and a person’s rights flowed from their membership of the religio-political entity. In the modern world, however, the author argues that there is ample reason to re-think these conclusions. Today, most Muslim nation-states recognize equal citizenship regardless of religion and are highly diverse. Large numbers of Muslims live as minorities in non-Muslim countries. Further, the death penalty for apostasy has weak textual support in the classical sources. The reaffirmation of pre-modern laws developed for different circumstances is unhelpful in the modern period. Pre-modern formulations of apostasy are particularly open to abuse in states which are authoritarian in nature, a feature of many Muslim states today. Moreover, the phenomenon of globalisation will mean more intensive linkages and mixes of people from different backgrounds. There is a need for an idea of religious freedom in Islam that accords with modern realities. Saeed argues that the weak textual basis of the law of apostasy and the greatly differing religio-political context of modern period are strong justifications for embarking on the task of reforming this law.
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ItemNon-monotone incentives in a model ofcoexisting hidden action and hidden information( 2006-12)In this paper I consider a model of coexisting moral hazard andadverse selection, similar to one considered by Guesnerie, Picard, and Rey(1989). I provide an explicit solution for the optimal incentive scheme in thecase, when the effort is observed with a normally distributed error. The mainobservation is that in this case the optimal incentive scheme often fails tobe monotone. If the monotonicity constraint is imposed on the solution foreconomic reasons there would exist a region of profit realizations, such thatthe optimal compensation will be independent of on performance.Keywords and Phrases: hidden action, hidden information, Fredholmintegral equations of the first type, Hermit polynomials.
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ItemEducation vouchers: means testing versusuniformity( 2006-12)This paper compares a uniform education voucher system with ameans-tested scheme in which the voucher is subject to a taper orwithdrawal rate as parental gross income increases. Parents are assumedto maximise a utility function which includes their consumption,leisure and the human capital of children. The human capitalproduction function has inputs consisting of parental human capitaland expenditure on education. The government faces a budget constraintsuch that the voucher and a social dividend are financed froma proportional income tax. Alternative combinations of voucher andtax and transfer schemes are evaluated using a social welfare functiondefined in terms of the utility of parents. It is found that for allcombinations of policy variables, a uniform voucher turns out to beoptimal. However, if a binding constraint is placed on the maximumtax rate, means-testing, with a low taper, is found to be optimal.
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ItemConsequences of FDI in Australia-Casual Links Between FDI, Domestic Investment, Economic Growth and Trade( 2006-12)In this paper the consequences of FDI inflows in Australia, the second largest netimporter of FDI in the developed world, are analysed using quarterly aggregate data forQ3/1985 to Q2/2002. The dynamic relationship between Australia’s aggregate quarterly FDIinflows and a set of endogenous variables including GDP, domestic investment, imports andexports was explored by estimating a multivariate vector error correction model. Grangercausalitytests and impulse response analysis were applied. FDI was found to directly increasedomestic investment growth, GDP growth and FDI itself, but decrease export growth.Furthermore, through its impact on GDP growth, FDI also leads to an increase in importgrowth.
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ItemHorizontal mergers with free entryin differentiated oligopolies( 2006-10)Antitrust authorities view the possibility of entry as a key determinant of whether a proposedmerger will be harmful to society. This paper examines the effects of horizontalmergers in models of non-localized, differentiated Bertrand oligopoly that allow for freeentry. The analysis of the long run effects of mergers in differentiated products marketsraises issues that are significantly different from those in the short run or in homogeneousproducts markets due to the introduction of new varieties. Our analysis reveals that determiningthe properties of consumer preferences is crucial to the antitrust analysis of mergersin differentiated products markets. Specifically, we show that if the demand system satisfiesthe Independence from Irrelevant Alternatives (IIA) property and if the number of firms istreated as a continuous variable, mergers in differentiated products markets have no longrun effect on consumer welfare. Moreover, in this case, marginal cost savings are to a largeextent irrelevant to the consumer welfare effects of mergers. If the number of firms is treatedas a discrete variable, fixed or marginal cost savings are a necessary condition for mergersto have zero or positive effect on consumer welfare. Using the example of linear demand,we show that if the demand system does not satisfy the IIA property, mergers in differentiatedproducts markets can harm consumer welfare in long run equilibrium. Moreover, theamount of harm increases with consumers’ taste for variety.