This paper examines the social opportunity cost of a hypothetical public project in Australia and compares these values with the cost of the project as measured by factor prices. Since 2001, the Australian taxation system has included an ad valorem tax, the Goods and Services Tax, however...

This article analyses the competition between cash and payment cards against the backdrop of the dual role of central banks - as issuers of cash and as institutions with a mandate to foster the efficiency of payment systems in general. It is argued that this dual role results in a number of...

This paper revisits one of the classic debates on world capitalist development – the ‘transition to capitalism’ debate framed in Robert Brenner’s classic critique of World Systems and Dependency Theory. It was originally presented to the July 2007 conference of the International...

Tests for causality and rationality in the coffee futures market were carried out using data from the New York Market. Tests of causality indicated that futures prices strongly influence variations in spot price eight weeks or more to maturity. However, beginning seven weeks to maturity there...

Prepublication version of ‘When things go wrong: the Political Economy of Market Breakdown’ in Westra; R and Alan Zuege (Eds) (2003) Value and the World Economy Today: Production; Finance and Globalization; pp91-118. London:MacMillan; ISBN: 1 40390 002 7 This paper constructs a theoretical...

Strategic management of universities must build the best possible relation between inputs and outputs. One relevant question, in this perspective, is whether the unit is making the best use of existing resources, or whether technical efficiency is in place. Here we address the question of...

In both developed and developing countries, there are basically two main sources of economic instability: exogenous shocks and inappropriate policies. Exogenous shock (terms-of-trade shocks, natural disasters and capital flow reversals) can throw an economy into disequilibrium and therefore...

This article presents a benchmarking model for measuring the efficiency of organizations that provide humanitarian aid. The model was developed and implemented in the framework of a large international aid program. The model is based on measuring the labor productivity of each organization that...

This paper studies a non-cooperative bargaining problem with one buyer and many sellers, focussing on the tension between the complementarity intrinsic to such a setup and efficiency. We address this problem in a very general setup with a technology that allows for variable degrees of...

We witness an economic crisis without precedent that affects every area of our existence, rich and poor, at a global scale. The noise of financial crisis makes us no longer perceive other crises, which no one seems ready to accept them, namely a crisis of values that proliferate in our society....