Intellectual Property and Indigenous Culture

The extent to which cultural activities can generate social and economic benefits for Indigenous communities, and the way in which those benefits are shared within communities depends largely on the way in which the system of intellectual property rights handles Indigenous cultural products. The aim of this paper is to address these issues, taking account of both legal and economic perspectives. Rather than taking concepts of intellectual property as given, we ask what kinds of intellectual property systems, if any, can best contribute to meeting the economic, social and cultural needs of Indigenous communities.Indigenous culture, intellectual property

Time to bury the zombie economics that led us into the crisis and produce more realistic, socially useful ideas

The effects of the global financial crisis make the headlines everyday in the UK and most of the developed world. Yet at the core of the financial and intellectual institutions that created the crisis, the meltdown of 2008 is already a distant memory. Professor John Quiggin examines the ‘zombie’ economic ideas that led us into the crisis and argues that we need to abandon theories based on absolute individual rationality and better understand the ‘animal spirits’ that can lead to boom and bus

Amateur content production, networked innovation and innovation policy

The central common feature of a number of recent technological developments (collectively referred to as Web 2.0) is collaborative production of content on an amateur basis, that is, for motives other than commercial reward. Amateur production of content generates significant external benefits that are shared by society in general. Indeed the amateur production of various types of content is probably more socially beneficial since it is typically given away free The individual and social benefits of such activity therefore justify public policy responses to the opportunity now before us.

Complexity, Climate Change and the Precautionary Principle

The precautionary principle has been proposed as a basis making decisions about environmental health under conditions of uncertainty, but remains controversial. This paper shows how the precautionary principle may be interpreted as a guide to decision making in complex systems characterised by unfavorable surprises. The application of the precautionary principle to the problem of climate change is discussed.

Risk and Social Democracy

‘Risk’ has become a central theme in 21st-century policy thinking. The fact that individuals and families are vulnerable to a wide range of social, economic and other risks, and that collective action is needed to help reduce and manage these risks, has long been important in social democratic thinking. The aim of this paper is to show how an improved understanding of risk can contribute to the development of a modernised social democratic model.

Water Policy After the Drought

For most of the last decade, water policy in Australia has been dominated by emergency responses to what was, on most measures, the worst drought in our history. Irrigators have received only small fractions of their normal allocations of water, while urban water users have been subject to restrictions of a stringency unparalleled in our recent experience. Debate continues on the extent to which the recent drought was the result of (natural or anthropogenic) climate change, and therefore on whether it can be seen as an exceptional shock or as a foretaste of a hotter and drier climate. At a minimum, it seems clear that the relatively wet conditions of the second half of the 20th century, which formed the basis of most water planning, are unlikely to recur. Despite the breaking of the drought in most regions, therefore, Australian water policy must deal with a fundamentally new environment. The era of abundant water availability, already reaching its limits in the 1980s, is now clearly behind us. When resources are scarce, the price mechanism invariably comes into play, either openly or through various forms of quasi-markets. The central theme of water policy pronouncements over the past two decades has been the need to make water prices and water markets more transparent and efficient. Policy practice, however, has been far less consistent. This paper presents a summary of the development of water policy in Australia, and an assessment of the current state of play. The analyses focuses on the contrast between the policies of the Victorian government, which seek to maintain rationing in various forms, and those embodied in the Commonwealth government’s Water for the Future Plan, which has shown at least some willingness to use prices and market-based policy instruments to achieve a more sustainable and efficient allocation of water resources.Murray Darling Basin, Drought, Water Policy

Blogs, wikis and creative innovation

blogs, internet, innovation

The Y2K scare: causes, costs and cures

The worldwide scare over the 'Y2K bug result in the expenditure of hundreds of billions of dollars on Y2K compliance and conversion policies. Most of this can be seen, in retrospect, to have been unproductive or, at least, misdirected. In this paper, the technological and institutional factors leading to the adoption of these policies are considered, along with suggestions as to how such policy failures could be avoided in future.Y2K, moral panics

Stories about productivity

In this paper, it is argued that, given its relatively short duration and high year-to-year variability, the MFP data set does not contain enough information to allow clear statistical discrimination between competing hypotheses. As a result of this lack of information, combined with the human predilection for observing patterns, a range of alternative stories, each of which may be supported by an appropriate interpretation of the data, has been produced. Three such stories are described here. The first is the ÔNew EconomyÕ story put forward by Parham and others. The second story agrees with the first regarding the 1990s, but interprets the subsequent decline in productivity growth as the result of a failure to pursue microeconomic reform with sufficient vigour. The third story rejects the idea of a productivity miracle in the 1990s and argues instead that productivity growth rates experienced a sharp decline at the end of the postwar ÔGolden AgeÕ around 1970, and that this decline has been sustained, although with fluctuations around the trend.

An agenda for social democracy

The aim of this paper is to restate the case for social democracy and to propose a policy agenda in response to the global financial crisis. The crisis is not a temporary aberration, to be followed by a return to the ‘normality’ of the late 20th century, dominated by the ideology of economic liberalism. Rather the economic and social system that emerges from the global financial crisis will be radically transformed. Social democrats face both new opportunities for reform, and new challenges and constraints resulting from the collapse of the economic order of the last three decades.