Living Standards, Terms of Trade and Foreign Ownership: Reflections on the Australian Mining Boom

Australia is experiencing its largest mining boom for more than a century and a half. This paper explores, from a national perspective, important economic differences that arise when a mining boom, such as the current one, is generated by sustained export price increases (trading gains) rather than export volume increases. Since 2003 the terms of trade changes – through their direct trading gain effect and indirect real GDP effects - have increased Australian living standards. The increase, measured from official data and relative to the US, is about 25 per cent; an increase which probably places Australian living standards well above those of the US. But official data inadequately adjusts for foreign ownership of mining resources suggesting that this estimate is probably a little too high.resource booms, terms of trade, real GDP, foreign ownership, economic growth

Competing with dad: changes in the intergenerational distribution of male labour market income

Two decades ago a discussion of the interactions between expenditure on the welfare system and labour market changes would have focussed on the impact of changing unemployment levels. Today, the unemployment-welfare expenditure link is still important but another factor has been added. Increasingly welfare policy discussions are focussing on the relationship between wage changes and welfare payments. There are three important recurring themes. First, the labour market has been generating wage falls among the low paid and changing the financial balance between low wages and social security benefits. After long periods of high unemployment, particularly long term unemployment, questions are increasingly raised as to whether a significant proportion of unemployment may be attributable to unemployment benefits that are too generous relative to employment at low wages. Second, there are increasing calls to adopt labour market policies to weaken centralised wage fixing and unions and, in this way, encourage low wages to fall further. In order to avoid the rapid growth of the working poor that may result from these initiatives, it is often suggested that labour market deregulation policies should be accompanied by income subsidies for the low paid. Under these circumstances, the demands on the social security budget will grow and there may be pressure to divert an increasing share of resources away from the unemployed towards those employed at low pay. Third, if low wages fall and there is an inadequate employment response, poverty will increase. The combination of unemployment, and low wages when employed, will severely affect the ability of the poor to escape poverty. Now that there is an increased interest in the interaction between wages and social security policy it seems natural to take the next step. This would involve combing the changes in employment and wages to focus on changing labour market income and to tease out some of the implications of the large changes that are occurring. Changes in labour market income can be an important contributor to changes in poverty. There are many dimensions along which changing labour market income could be explored. We choose to direct attention to the changes that are occurring among males of different ages. The changes in Australia are very large. Changes of a similar magnitude are occurring in the UK and similar, but smaller, changes are observed in the US. The paper is structured as follows. Part II provides some general background. It compares Australian changes in the distribution of male wages with changes in the UK and US. The US can be thought of as an unregulated labour market that perhaps describes the direction in which Australia is moving. The UK is particularly interesting because it has followed a policy of labour market deregulation and since many UK labour market institutions were similar to ours the experience there might be particularly relevant. Part III widens the discussion beyond wages to employment and draws attention to the large changes that are occurring in male labour market income across different age groups. It focuses on wage and employment changes and documents the growing loss of labour market income among the young. We conjecture about some of the implications of these changes. Part IV returns to the international context and compares the Australian labour market income changes across different age groups with the changes that are occurring in the US. It adds an employment dimension to the large US literature on wage inequality (see Levy and Murnane, 1992). Part V offers concluding comments and speculates on the important of these large changes for social security policy

Labour market outcomes in the UK, NZ, Australia and the US: observations on the impact of labour market and economic reforms

There is no doubt that large changes in government policy towards economic reform are vitally important: some two decades ago Myanmar (Burma) was among the Asian nations with the highest per capita income but, by turning away from economic reform, government policy prevented the economy from opening to the world, accepting foreign investment and developing a free enterprise culture. As a result Myanmar has not shared in the rapid rise in income in Asia. China is another example. Once economic reform began and international trade and domestic product markets were liberalised, economic growth began to proceed quite rapidly. But how much influence do less radical shifts in economic reform policy have on the macro economies of mature democracies with a high standard of living? Do increases in the pace of reform deliver a noticeable increase in the rate of economic growth in countries such as New Zealand, Australia and the UK? Once the task of assessing the impact of economic reforms is begun a number of important lessons are learnt very quickly. Perhaps the most important is that assessment is not a straightforward exercise. The isolation of reform impacts is a difficult problem that is often handled by construction of a computer model of the pre-reform economy that is then subject to the reform change and the reform results simulated. The obvious inadequacy with this approach is that the model is often designed to deliver good results from the reforms. The arguments for reforms and the design of the model are based on the same theoretical view of the economy. The counterfactual problem therefore will always remain. In this paper we focus on labour market and economic reforms and their impact on economic growth, employment and wage outcomes in the longer term. To make the task more manageable we describe the economic growth experiences of four English speaking countries. We look at the impact of the Thatcher reforms in the UK, the Douglas reforms in New Zealand, and the Hawke Accord period and subsequent labour market reform in Australia. The US is taken as a comparison country that has not been subject to substantial shifts in government introduced labour market and economic reforms except, perhaps, in the area of immigration and very recently in the area of welfare reforms. The welfare reforms are substantial but it is too early for them to impact significantly on our comparisons. We adopt a very aggregated approach. The focus is on four series taken from the OECD Economic Outlook data base: the analysis is based on measures of (i)output produced for the residents of each country (GDP per capita) (ii)the proportion of the population employed (the employment-population ratio) (iii)the changing living standards of the employed population (the rate of growth of real compensation per employee); and (iv)the changing distribution of full time weekly earnings. It is important to present the macro data because it helps set the framework for other chapters in this volume. The major advantage of this aggregative analysis is that it provides a macro framework that acts as a constraint on exaggerating the losses and gains that may be identified from a more piecemeal assessment. The disadvantage, of course, is that the diversity of experience within the aggregates is lost

Gauss-Bonnet Black Holes in dS Spaces

We study the thermodynamic properties associated with black hole horizon and cosmological horizon for the Gauss-Bonnet solution in de Sitter space. When the Gauss-Bonnet coefficient is positive, a locally stable small black hole appears in the case of spacetime dimension $d=5$, the stable small black hole disappears and the Gauss-Bonnet black hole is always unstable quantum mechanically when $d \ge 6$. On the other hand, the cosmological horizon is found always locally stable independent of the spacetime dimension. But the solution is not globally preferred, instead the pure de Sitter space is globally preferred. When the Gauss-Bonnet coefficient is negative, there is a constraint on the value of the coefficient, beyond which the gravity theory is not well defined. As a result, there is not only an upper bound on the size of black hole horizon radius at which the black hole horizon and cosmological horizon coincide with each other, but also a lower bound depending on the Gauss-Bonnet coefficient and spacetime dimension. Within the physical phase space, the black hole horizon is always thermodynamically unstable and the cosmological horizon is always stable, further, as the case of the positive coefficient, the pure de Sitter space is still globally preferred. This result is consistent with the argument that the pure de Sitter space corresponds to an UV fixed point of dual field theory.Comment: Rextex, 17 pages including 8 eps figures, v2: minor changes, to appear in PRD, v3: references adde

U(1) Gauge Field of the Kaluza-Klein Theory in the Presence of Branes

We investigate the zero mode dimensional reduction of the Kaluza-Klein unifications in the presence of a single brane in the infinite extra dimension. We treat the brane as fixed, not a dynamical object, and do not require the orbifold symmetry. It seems that, contrary to the standard Kaluza-Klein models, the 4D effective action is no longer invariant under the U(1) gauge transformations due to the explicit breaking of isometries in the extra dimension by the brane. Surprisingly, however, the linearized perturbation analysis around the RS vacuum shows that the Kaluza-Klein gauge field does possess the U(1) gauge symmetry at the linear level. In addition, the graviscalar also behaves differently from the 4D point of view. Some physical implications of our results are also discussed.Comment: 10 pages, revtex, no figure, version to appear in Phys. Rev. D, possible caveats of our results due to the zero mode ansatz we used are explained in more detai

The eta' meson from lattice QCD

We study the flavour singlet pseudoscalar mesons from first principles using lattice QCD. With N_f=2 flavours of light quark, this is the so-called eta_2 meson and we discuss the phenomenological status of this. Using maximally twisted-mass lattice QCD, we extract the mass of the eta_2 meson at two values of the lattice spacing for lighter quarks than previously discussed in the literature. We are able to estimate the mass value in the limit of light quarks with their physical masses.Comment: 16 pages: version accepted for publicatio

Charged rotating dilaton black branes in AdS universe

We present the metric for the $(n+1)$-dimensional charged rotating dilaton black branes with cylindrical or toroidal horizons in the background of anti-de Sitter spacetime. We find the suitable counterterm which removes the divergences of the action in the presence of the dilaton potential in all higher dimensions. We plot the Penrose diagrams of the spacetime and reveal that the spacetime geometry crucially modifies in the presence of the dilaton field. The conserved and thermodynamic quantities of the black branes are also computed.Comment: 13 pages, 3 figures, to appear in Gen. Relat. Gravi

Thermodynamics of higher dimensional topological charged AdS black branes in dilaton gravity

In this paper, we study topological AdS black branes of $(n+1)$-dimensional Einstein-Maxwell-dilaton theory and investigate their properties. We use the area law, surface gravity and Gauss law interpretations to find entropy, temperature and electrical charge, respectively. We also employ the modified Brown and York subtraction method to calculate the quasilocal mass of the solutions. We obtain a Smarr-type formula for the mass as a function of the entropy and the charge, compute the temperature and the electric potential through the Smarr-type formula and show that these thermodynamic quantities coincide with their values which are calculated through using the geometry. Finally, we perform a stability analysis in the canonical ensemble and investigate the effects of the dilaton field and the size of black brane on the thermal stability of the solutions. We find that large black branes are stable but for small black brane, depending on the value of dilaton field and type of horizon, we encounter with some unstable phases.Comment: 21 pages, 21 figures, references updated, minor editing, accepted in EPJC (DOI: 10.1140/epjc/s10052-010-1483-3

Medium-term environmental changes influence age-specific survival estimates in a salmonid population

Human-induced environmental change is a major stressor on freshwater habitats that has resulted in the population declines of many freshwater species. Ontogenetic shifts in habitat use and associated (st)age-specific requirements mean that impacts of environmental stressors can influence (st)ages in a population differently, and yet relatively few studies of freshwater fish populations account for their detail. We aimed to identify environmental and biotic factors affecting survival estimated for six age-classes of a European grayling population in the River Wylye, UK over a 17-year period. We used a Bayesian age-structured state space model to estimate survival of grayling cohorts between subsequent life stages (eggs to age 5 adults) for 16 annual transitions (2003–2004 to 2018–2019), whilst accounting for imperfect sampling of the population. We quantified the effects of seasonal water flow and temperature, in-stream habitat and prey resource, and potential competitors and predators on survival between subsequent life stages. We used Bayesian variable selection to gauge their relative importance on survival. Grayling abundances declined during the study period (>75% in all age-classes), predominately driven by a loss of mature adults. Changes to seasonal flows negatively influenced their survival: increased days of summer low flow related to decreased survival of subadults and mature adults, and lower winter flows related to reduced recruitment of juveniles from eggs. Higher summer macrophyte cover negatively influenced juvenile and subadult survival and increasing days of high temperature in summer appeared detrimental to juvenile survival. Abundance of brown trout (a potential competitor and predator) did not negatively influence grayling survival. Our results reveal the implications of environmental change on a salmonid population, where recent low summer flows and high temperatures, and below average winter flows, have negatively influenced grayling survival. These conditions appear to be becoming more frequent and persistent in our study river, which is towards the species’ southern range limit, which could render the population vulnerable to climate change. Our study demonstrates how careful analysis of long-term population monitoring and environmental datasets can identify factors affecting (st)age-specific fish population dynamics, and when combined with local expertise, results in realistic mitigation proposals to promote wildlife population persistence