The governance of grapes: The NSW Inquiry into the Wine Grape Market and Prices (2010) -- An assessment

The contribution of the grape growing and wine making industries to Australia’s continued economic prosperity is under threat. While international market dynamics are often cited as the cause, the problem of oversupply and more specifically calls for government intervention were the focus of the recently completed NSW Legislative Council’s Standing Committee on State Development Wine Grape Market and Prices Inquiry (Catanzariti Inquiry, 2010a). This paper examines the process and outcomes of the Inquiry and the NSW Government’s response to its recommendations. It is argued that a mandatory Code of Conduct ought to be adopted by the industry to govern the relationships between winegrape growers and wine makers

Good to share? The pecuniary implications of moving to shared service production for local government services

© 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd Shared services are often lauded as an efficacious means of reducing municipal expenditure and thereby improving waning financial sustainability. However, most of the extant theoretical and empirical work only considers costs and benefits at the level of the specific service in question and, hence, fails to capture many of the wider benefits and costs that might accrue to local governments. In this article we first build a schema to illustrate the benefits and costs of moving from separate to collaborative production at the level of individual local authorities. We then test two hypotheses drawn from the schema against a five-year panel of expenditure data. We find evidence of increased expenditure in the order of 8 per cent that prima facie runs counter to the objectives of many municipal managers engaged with shared services. We conclude by considering the implications of our findings for cooperative ventures between local authorities

A square deal? Mining costs, mining royalties and local government in New South Wales, Australia

© 2017 Elsevier Ltd Mining operations are often controversial since they can impose significant external costs on the local municipalities and local inhabitants. Under current legislative arrangements in New South Wales (NSW), Australia, local governments are constrained from recouping costs directly from mines by means of increased property taxes on mines due to state-wide limitations on tax increases – known colloquially as the ‘rate-cap’. Moreover, mining royalties are paid directly to the NSW government and not to affected councils. In this paper, set against the background of mining activities in NSW, we estimate the magnitude of costs imposed by mining operations on rural and regional local authorities. We then offer alternative public policy solutions which would enable affected municipalities to recoup some or all of the cost burden placed on them by mining operations in their respective local government areas

A Conceptual Note on Scale Economies, Size Economies and Scope Economies in Australian Local Government

The notion that 'bigger is better' has underpinned municipal structural reform policy in Australia and led to its heavy reliance on amalgamation. Several advantages are believed to flow from larger councils, including scale economies and scope economies. However, a surprising feature of the debate over amalgamation is not only the paucity of empirical evidence supporting the idea that 'bigger is cheaper', but also the marked degree of conceptual confusion between size economies, scale economies and scope economies. This article seeks to ameliorate this confusion by carefully distinguishing between these theoretically distinct concepts in the institutional context of Australian local government

Alex Kerr's 'Dogs and Demons' and the Problems of Contemporary Japan: A Review Note

In his controversial new book 'Dogs and Demons: The Fall of Modern Japan', Alex Kerr (2001) maintains that modern Japan represents 'a case of failed modernization' due to a deep-seated 'cultural malaise' that arises 'because of a severe mismatch between Japan's bureaucratic systems and the realities of modern life'. Kerr arguesthis thesis by means of examples drawn from the arts, culture, economics, politics and other aspects of contemporary Japan. This review note attempts to provide a critical examination of Kerr's economic arguments. We contend that he has radically overstated his case, ignored much existing critical literature on Nippon, and 'exoticised' Japanese society unnecessarily

Corruption and Foreign Direct Investments: A Panel Analysis

This paper investigates the effects of corruption on foreign direct investment (FDI) inflows controlling for other relevant determinants using a panel data approach for 45 countries over 1997-2004. While economic theory suggests that corruption should discourage FDI, many notably corrupt countries receive substantial FDI - an anomaly worthy of investigation. In common with other empirical work, we find no statistically significant impact of corruption on FDI. This suggests that policies designed to attract additional foreign FDI should focus on corporate income taxes and other determinants of investment rather than on the intractable problem of reducing the level of corruption

Calculating Developer Charges for Urban Infrastructure: A Feasible Method for Applying Marginal Cost Pricing

In common with other realms of economic endeavor, marginal cost pricing is socially optimal in guiding both the use of existing local public services as well as investment in these services (Baumol and Bradford [2]). But urban infrastructure, such as water supply, sewerage and drainage, has a number of idiosyncratic features, like lumpiness, uncertainty over demand, and inherited systems, which make the determination of marginal cost in the real world extremely difficult. Turvey [15] argued that in these circumstances marginal costs center on "central system costs" that can be thought of as the "headworks" and major capital works of an infrastructure service network that are characterized by longevity, lumpiness and excess capacity.Each infrastructure service provider is envisaged as having a schedule of investment plans into the future that optimizes production and investment timing. Put differently, the schedule minimizes the expected present worth of all avoidable costs and no change in the way planned output is produced will lower the present worth of these future costs. If we postulate that demand for the service unexpectedly, but permanently, rises (or falls) by a given amount, then output must also adjust to accommodate this permanent increment. This means that planned future investments will have to be rescheduled. Perhaps a rescheduling of the whole program will be necessary, but at a minimum, the timing of some future expansions of capacity will have to be brought forward. This implies that there will be a new present worth of the stream of future costs that now takes the permanent increment into account. Turvey [13] defined marginal cost as the difference between these two cost streams.If we accept the convention of excluding expected running costs from developer charges, then we can define an ideal developer charge for headworks and major works of some infrastructural service by applying the Turvey [15] concept of marginal cost. An ideal charge would equal the MCC of the permanent output increment required by the development, measured as follows: The present worth of the least-cost investment expenditure stream with the permanent output increment that a development will occasion less the present worth of the least-cost investment expenditure stream without the increment due to development