Institutions, Firms and Economic Growth

This paper reviews the literature on institutions and explores the ways in which institutions can influence economic growth, with a particular focus on how institutions affect the use that firms make of human capital to improve their productivity. It discusses the influence of underlying institutions, such as law and order and secure property rights, on the general environment within which the economic activities of production and exchange takes place. It also explores the influence of activity-specific institutions, such as labour market institutions, on firm decisions about resource use and innovation and through these on economic activity and economic growth.institutions; human capital; regulation; norms; firms; economic growth; New Zealand

Productive cities: opportunity in a changing economy

Most Australians live and work in cities. They are essential to generating growth and to creating and distributing opportunities. Cities are shaped by where people live, where they work, and how they get around. When these three things are in tune with the structure of the economy, cities operate efficiently and productively, and drive growth and innovation.This report examines housing, income and travel data in Australia\u27s four largest cities and reveals strains in the triangle of work, home and transport that could threaten national prosperity.Addressing these issues will provide a significant boost to national productivity, because as the economy becomes more knowledge intensive, deep labour markets and good links between firms become more important.Firms engaged in high-knowledge activities benefit from connections that enable them to collaborate and learn from one another. They locate in places with deep labour markets to ensure that they can attract the talent and skill they need.This report reveals, however, that labour markets are shallow in significant parts of Australia‟s biggest cities. In many suburbs – particularly outer suburbs – residents can reach fewer than 10 per cent of all metropolitan jobs with a reasonable commuting time.Increasingly, employees with high-level qualifications and high incomes live close to the heart of our cities. Meanwhile, workers with trade skills or low skills, and people on lower incomes, tend to live further from the centre. Rising house prices have exacerbated this divide. If this polarisation continues, then many people risk being locked out of the parts of the city that offer the richest access to jobs.How can government\u27s respond? Governments are frequently called upon to create jobs in outer suburban areas by offering incentives to business to relocate or by building new employment clusters from scratch. Yet there is little evidence that such policies work. A better option is to move people closer to jobs. This can be done in two ways. First, the supply and diversity of dwellings in existing suburbs can be increased. Previous Grattan research has shown that people want more housing choice. It can be created if the disincentives developers face are addressed, if suburbs are not locked down by restrictive zoning and planning rules and if residents are engaged up front in decisions affecting their neighbourhoods.Second, the transport system‟s capacity to connect people and jobs can and must be improved. That means better road systems and better public transport. Facing up to the challenges of road use pricing would go a long way to ensuring that space on city roads goes to the most important and most productive uses, and could raise revenue to help increase public transport capacity.The shape of our cities is above all an economic issue. Giving knowledge-intensive firms access to more workers would make them more productive. It would also give workers more opportunities to find rewarding jobs. Better functioning cities would unleash higher productivity, and provide everyone with more opportunities. In this case, what is good for the economy is also good for the fair go

Financing New Zealand Superannuation

The New Zealand Superannuation Fund is being established as a means of smoothing out the impact on the rest of the Crown’s finances of the transition that will take place over the next fifty years to a permanently higher proportion of the population being eligible for New Zealand Superannuation, the universal pension paid to New Zealanders over the age of 65. This paper discusses the financial issues surrounding the determination of the contributions that the Government would be required to make to the Fund over time in order to meet this objective. The calculation of the required contribution rate is derived as a function of future expected entitlement payments, future expected nominal GDP, future expected investment returns, and the Fund balance. Estimation issues are discussed and the implications of volatility in investment returns are examined. Some issues in assessing long-term expected returns are addressed in an appendix.pension fund; capital markets; investment returns; social security; retirement income

Mapping Australia’s economy: cities as engines of prosperity

This report maps the Australian economy by the location of economic activity, defined as the dollar value of goods and services produced by workers within a particular area. Overview Eighty per cent of the value of all goods and services produced in Australia is generated on just 0.2 per cent of the nation’s land mass – mostly in cities. Today, cities are the engines of economic prosperity. But the concentration of highly productive activity in city centres presents challenges for policymakers. Too many workers live too far away to fulfil our cities’ economic potential. This report maps the Australian economy by the location of economic activity, defined as the dollar value of goods and services produced by workers within a particular area. It finds that economic activity is concentrated most heavily in the central business districts (CBDs) and inner areas of large cities. The CBDs of Sydney and Melbourne – just 7.1 square kilometres in total – generated $118 billion in 2011-12, almost 10 per cent of all economic activity in Australia, and triple the contribution of the entire agriculture sector. The intense economic contribution of CBDs occurs partly because of the concentration of jobs in these areas. But CBD businesses are also much more productive on average than those in other areas. Inner city areas and secondary commercial hubs, such as those around large cities’ airports, also tend to be more productive than other locations. For example, in 2011-12 the Sydney CBD produced$64.1 billion worth of goods and services: about $100 for every hour worked there. Employing only 13 per cent of Sydney’s workforce, this small area generates almost a quarter of the value of the Greater Sydney economy. Parramatta, often said to be Sydney’s second CBD, generated only$68 for each hour worked, and its total of $6.8 billion was about a tenth of the value generated in the CBD. There is a reason intense economic activity is concentrating in CBDs and inner suburbs. Many businesses in these areas provide highly knowledge-intensive and specialised services such as funds management, insurance, design, engineering and international education. These businesses depend on highly skilled workers, and locating in the heart of large cities gives them access to the largest possible pools of them. Proximity to suppliers, customers and partners also helps businesses to work efficiently, to generate opportunities and to come up with new ideas and ways of working. Knowledge-intensive activity is present in all sectors, including manufacturing and mining. Perth’s CBD is home to more than a third of Western Australian mining jobs, including accountants, administrators, geologists and specialist engineers. In the early 20th century one in three workers were employed in primary industry and almost half of the population lived on rural properties or in towns of less than 3,000 people. By 1960 manufacturing had grown to make up almost 30 per cent of GDP and employ one in four Australians, with a big presence in suburban areas. But today the small areas that generate most value are often a very long commute from the fast-growing outer suburbs in which many Australians live. If the prosperity that comes from knowledge-intensive activity is to be widely shared, governments need to enable more people to live closer to these areas, and to improve road and public transport networks so that they better connect employers and workers

THE EFFECTS OF MINIMUM SIZE LIMITS ON RECREATIONAL FISHING

Minimum size limits have become an increasingly popular management tool in recreational fisheries. This popularity stems from the potential of minimum size limits to accomplish the twin goals of limiting overfishing and improving fishing quality through increasing the average size of fish caught. The success of minimum size limits in achieving these objectives depends, in a complicated way, on both the behavior of anglers and the biological mechanisms that guide the growth of the fish population. This paper examines these relationships and also considers the welfare implications of size regulations.Resource /Energy Economics and Policy,

A MODEL OF MINIMUM SIZE LIMIT REGULATIONS

Minimum size limits have become an increasingly popular management tool in recreational fisheries. This popularity stems from the potential of minimum size limits to accomplish the twin goals of limiting overfishing and improving fishing quality through increasing the average size of fish caught. The success of minimum size limits in achieving these objectives depends in a complicated way on both the behavior of anglers and the biological mechanisms that guide the growth of the fish population. This paper examines these relationships and also considers the welfare implications of size regulations.Resource /Energy Economics and Policy,

Enabling Scalable and Sustainable Softwarized 5G Environments

The fifth generation of telecommunication systems (5G) is foreseen to play a fundamental role in our socio-economic growth by supporting various and radically new vertical applications (such as Industry 4.0, eHealth, Smart Cities/Electrical Grids, to name a few), as a one-fits-all technology that is enabled by emerging softwarization solutions \u2013 specifically, the Fog, Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC), Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) and Software-Defined Networking (SDN) paradigms. Notwithstanding the notable potential of the aforementioned technologies, a number of open issues still need to be addressed to ensure their complete rollout. This thesis is particularly developed towards addressing the scalability and sustainability issues in softwarized 5G environments through contributions in three research axes: a) Infrastructure Modeling and Analytics, b) Network Slicing and Mobility Management, and c) Network/Services Management and Control. The main contributions include a model-based analytics approach for real-time workload profiling and estimation of network key performance indicators (KPIs) in NFV infrastructures (NFVIs), as well as a SDN-based multi-clustering approach to scale geo-distributed virtual tenant networks (VTNs) and to support seamless user/service mobility; building on these, solutions to the problems of resource consolidation, service migration, and load balancing are also developed in the context of 5G. All in all, this generally entails the adoption of Stochastic Models, Mathematical Programming, Queueing Theory, Graph Theory and Team Theory principles, in the context of Green Networking, NFV and SDN

Selected Metaphors in Elie Wiesel

Who is Elie Wiesel? Elie Wiesel, a Jewish writer, is the 1986 winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. He was born on September 30, 1928 in Sighet, Rumania, a small village in the Carpathian Mountains. When he was a young boy, he was a sensitive student who especially enjoyed studying the Talmud and other Jewish religious texts. In 1944 when he was fifteen, his father, a shopkeeper; his mother, an educated woman; his two older sisters, a baby sister and he were deported by cattle car to Auschwitz. The men and women were separated; he never saw his mother and baby sister again. He watched his father die from mistreatment, beatings, and starvation. After the war he and his older sisters were reunited. One sister is now deceased. When the war was over Wiesel was seventeen and quite sick. He was taken with other survivors of Buchenwald to France. Working and studying in Paris, he was eventually hired as a journalist. Wiesel vowed not to write about his Holocaust experience for ten years. After those years he was encouraged to write Night, his autobiography, followed by twenty other books in twenty years. Most of his books deal with the Holocaust. Wiesel continues to study the Bible and the Talmud today. After he completes many pages for a book he cuts and condenses into fewer pages. He has written Bible stories, stories of Russian Jews, retold old Jewish Hasidic tales and legends and written on other themes as well as his major theme of the Holocaust. Always bearing witness, Wiesel works with an end in view, that is, to prevent killers from killing again. He believes that the story of the Holocaust must be told so that such a catastrophe will never be repeated. French is the language in which Elie Wiesel writes. New York is their home. Wiesel, a lecturer, traveler, storyteller, and witness, is the Andrew Mellon Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Boston University. Elie Wiesel\u27s literary witness is supported historically and photographically by The Auschwitz Album, a book based upon an album discovered by a concentration camp survivor, Lili Meier

Investigation into the starting salaries of male and female veterinarians, An

2017 Fall.Includes bibliographical references.Historically, the United States veterinary industry has been a male-dominated field, but in recent years women have surpassed men in veterinary school enrollment and now make up 60% of practicing veterinarians. There is evidence of a persistent gap between the starting salaries of male and female veterinary school graduates. This research investigates the effect of factors previously used to explain this gap and explores other factors that could further explain the unexplained residual gap heretofore attributed to wage discrimination. Most studies of wage gap attribute any unexplained residual from their statistical models as being the result of gender discrimination. However, most have not quantified or analyzed the effect of inherent differences between males and females, which could explain more of the unexplained portion instead of simple attribution toward systematic gender bias. Analysis of survey data of graduating veterinary medicine students reveals that the wage differential between the aggregate means of men and women is largely explained by employment self-selection, driven by what sectors the male and female graduates are choosing as their beginning employment within the veterinary field. However, much is still left unexplained. This study quantifies fundamental differences in the effect of male and female attributes through the regression techniques including ordinary lease squares and matching methods to analyze factors that explain the wage gap. The three-step methodology starts from an examination of the wage gap at the mean through the least squares models and then refines the resolution of analysis to identify that the wage gap is actually larger than originally estimated when comparing individuals with the same demographic factors through nearest neighbor matching. From this analysis, the fundamental differences between starting male and female veterinarians provide insight as to why the wage gap exists