Building an efficient national roads system (journal article)
by Max Lay
from ATSE Focus August/September 2009
"We tend to forget how permanent roads are and how ongoing are the benefits and disbenefits that they createRoads are an integral part of our nation's infrastructure. British colonisation in 1788 brought with it the requirement that every piece of subdivided land had to have land access via a public right-of-way. The land was often grudgingly given and was rarely part of any grander transport plan. Thus, almost from the beginning, governments have had to step in and impose a grander vision beyond the farm-to-market needs of individual land owners.
Another major problem has been our inability to control, let alone predict, future land use. State governments need to be much better in the way in which they match land-use controls with economic and social strategies at one extreme and transport plans at the other.Thus, road planning must allow for a range of future scenarios, as today's assumptions and passionately held views are quite likely to be proved wrong. To avoid past parochialism, planning for any new road system must also be done at a level above the immediate region affected by the planning."
Infrastructure needs multi-layered partnerships and robust coordination (journal article)
by Mike Mrdak and Mike Taylor
from ATSE Focus, August/September 2009
"Infrastructure needs multi-layered partnerships and robust coordination
The domestic freight task has doubled in size over the past 20 years, with growth averaging 3.5 per cent a year. This trend is likely to continue into the futureGetting our resources to market efficiently and seamlessly will be a key to Australia's global competitiveness in the 21st century. Productivity of our supply chains will come not just from investment in our rail lines, road and ports, but, just as importantly, planning, regulatory and governance reforms, and innovation to remove current restrictions and avoid bottlenecks building up in the future.The challenge for infrastructure and transport is to ensure that capacity constraints to growth of exports that have occurred in the past are not repeated."
Government Outsourcing: Public Contracting with Private Monopoly (journal article)
By Emmanuelle Auriol and Pierre M. Picard
from The Economic Journal Vol 119 Iss 540 2009, pp. 1464-1493
"The article studies the impact of the government budget constraint on the regulation of natural monopolies in adverse selection contexts. The government maximises total surplus but incurs some cost of public funds à la Laffont and Tirole (1993). Government outsourcing is proposed as an alternative to regulation in which firms freely enter the market and choose their prices and output levels. However the government can contract ex post with the private firms. This ex post contracting set-up allows more flexibility than regulation where governments commit to both investment and operation cash-flows. This is especially relevant in case of high technological uncertainties."
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Managing occupational boundaries to improve innovation outcomes in industry-research organisations (journal article)
By Kathryn J Hayes and J Anneke Fitzgerald
from Journal of Management & Organisation Vol 15 No 4 Sept 2009, pp. 423-437
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Commercialisation activities combining the discoveries of one occupational group, such as scientists, with the commercial skills of managers involve interactions across occupational and organisational cultures.
This article explores the challenges posed by working across occupational and organisational boundaries, and describes management techniques developed informally in four Australian organisations to address barriers to knowledge transfer. It identifies the existence of Knowledge-stewarding Communities of Practice (CoP) that span organisational boundaries and impact commercialisation outcomes. It also presents recommendations for management practice based upon diversity management and innovation theories.
The context of the study is Australian hybrid industry-research organisations composed of academic, government and industry personnel. Semi-structured interviews with a total of twenty scientists, engineers and managers focused on their experiences of knowledge sharing across organisational and occupational cultures, and methods used to manage these boundaries. The existence and efficacy of boundary-crossing individuals and boundary object strategies are explored. A generic process management model of innovation is extended to acknowledge and accommodate occupational and organisational cultural proclivities towards exploration or exploitation, and to stimulate future research."
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Flexible Contract Workers in Inferior Jobs: Reappraising the Evidence (journal article)
by Colin Green , Parvinder Kler and Gareth Leeves
from British Journal of Industrial Relations 22 Jun 2009
"There is concern that the increase in flexible employment contracts witnessed in many OECD economies is evidence of a growth in low-pay, low-quality jobs. In practice, it is difficult to evaluate the 'quality' of flexible jobs. Previous research has primarily investigated objective measures of job quality such as wages and training or subjective measures such as job satisfaction. We jointly evaluate these elements of flexible employment contracts using a job quality index. Analysis of this index demonstrates that flexible jobs are of a lower quality. Differences in the subjective and objective assessment of factors like pay and hours are evident."
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The Best New Ideas in Business
by Paul Keegan
from Fortune, Vol 160, No 5 14 September 2009
"The article focuses on the company Zipcar, a car-sharing service. Zipcars are available in several U.S. cities, including Seattle, Washington, San Francisco, California, and New York City, as well as in Britain. Scott Griffith, chief executive officer for Zipcar, said that the company will turn a profit in the third quarter of 2009. "
The Great Sugar Rush (article)
by Michael Knox
from RBS Morgans. Economic Strategy. Sept 14 2009
"Steady growth in industrial demand for sugar for use as a bio fuel has outpaced its unsteady
increases in production. Right now the stocks-to-consumption ratio for sugar is the lowest
this century. Prices have run up rapidly. Buyers have run to buy the commodity. Producers
are enjoying this great sugar rush."
Codifying Culture: indigenous Australian art commercial code of conduct (journal article)
by Lan Pham and Terri Janke
from Indigenous Law Bulletin, Vol 7 No 13 July/August 2009
"The key recommendation of a 2007 Inquiry was the establishment of an Indigenous Art Commercial Code of Conduct to set minimum national standards for appropriate ethical trade. ... The draft has been established as a voluntary guideline and is intended to be used in the formation of agreements between artists, agents and dealers. "
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Towards an ecologically sound Australian tax system (journal article)
by Charles Berger
from National Environmental Law Review, 2009:2, pp.24 - 32
"[Treasury Secretary Ken] Henry proposed that the three traditional principles of good tax design - equity, efficiency and simplicity - principles which have stood the test of time since Adam Smith's day, be supplemented by a fourth: environmental sustainability. The notion that environmental considerations were not just important, but should be at the very core of tax policy design, must have seemd at least provocative, if not heretical."
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Methods explained: The balance of payments (journal article)
by Graeme Chamberlin
from Economic & Labour Market Review, vol 3, no 9, pp 44-51
"This article describes the main features of the United Kingdom Balance of Payments. The Balance of Payments essentially records one nation’s transactions with the rest of the world – relating to conventional trade in goods and services, income flows and the transfer in ownership of financial assets across borders. The International Investment Position, or net asset position, is the part of the Balance of Payments that records net stocks of the UK’s foreign assets and liabilities. The relationship between this and investment income is also analysed. Finally, the impact of the global recession and credit crunch on recent Balance of Payments data is presented."
Capitalising research and development: towards the new system of National AccountsUpdates previous work to include improvements to measuring R&D deflation, depreciation, rate of return and stocks (journal article)
by Peter Evans, M. Khalid Nadeem Khan, Lars Wenzell
from Economic & Labour Market Review, vol 3, no 9, pp 16-23
"This article extends the earlier work on capitalisation of R&D in response to the proposals in the new System of National Accounts (SNA). Major improvements include: R&D deflators, depreciation rate for non-market R&D, rate of return, and estimates of R&D capital stocks. In addition, the article highlights areas for future improvements and presents preliminary estimates for the impact of capitalisation on the UK National Accounts. R&D capitalisation raises the level of UK GDP by approximately 1.6 per cent and gross capital formation by about 9 per cent. These changes are due to capitalisation of R&D rather than an actual improvement to GDP growth, which is estimated to be minimal. These fi gures are preliminary, based on experimental methods, and should therefore be interpreted with caution. The authors welcome comments and complementary evidence that can be used to substantiate or revise the assumptions made throughout this article. "
Competitive alternatives : KPMG's guide to international business costs [online]
Authors: KPMG / MMK Consulting
A guide to comparing business locations in North America, Europe, and Asia Pacific. It measures the combined impact of 27 significant cost components that are most likely to vary by location, as applied to specific industries and business operations.
Brisbane's Top 50 Private Companies
by Matthew Ogg
from Brisbane Business News, September 2009
"WHILE the share market has been on the mend in recent months, the ASX's volatility over the past year has shown that private business does have its benefits. This month Brisbane Business News profiles the city's top private companies - the quietly confident high-achievers that pass under the radar, yet manage to cover so much ground."
The cooking-immigration nexus (journal article)
by Bob Birrell, Ernest Healy and Bob Kinnaird
from People and Place, v.17, no.1, 2009, pp. 63-75
"There has been a meteoric rise in enrolments of overseas students in cooking courses in Australia from around 1019 in 2004 to 8242 in 2008. All are trained in full-time courses conducted mainly by private providers, rather than by the apprenticeship system which is the norm for Australian-trained cooks. ... This article examines the rules governing the training and subsequent vasaing of these cooks. It concludes that there are serious gaps in the rules governing their training and the assessment of their competency. In large part because of these definciencies, only a minority obtain employment in Australia as trade-level cooks."
Writing for Results (article)
By Patricia Hoyle.
from Management Today September 2009
To keep misunderstandings in business to a minimum; clear, concise written communications are essential.
Total public sector output and productivity: presents latest estimates for public service productivity between 1998 and 2007 (article)
by Fraser Munroe, Mike Phelps
from Economic & Labour Market Review, vol 3, no 8, pp 45-55.
"Public services account for over 20 per cent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Almost everyone is a potential user of public services such as the NHS or schools. Taxpayers, as the main funders of public services, also have a legitimate concern about what we are getting for our money. One important aspect of this, though not the only aspect, is productivity: the quantity of output that is produced divided by the quantity of input used. The Office for National Statistics (ONS) has published periodic assessments of the productivity performance of key public services. This article presents estimates for all public services collectively for the first time since the 2003 ONS article Understanding Government Output and Productivity (Pritchard, 2003). "
Australian cultural and innovation policies: Never the twain shall meet? (journal article)
By Ben Eltham
from Innovation: Management Policy and Practice Vol 11 Iss 2 Aug 2009, pp. 230-239
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In recent years, Australian cultural policy-makers have begun to pay more attention to innovation policy. Several of the Australian states specifically address issues of innovation in their formal cultural policies, and the Australia Council for the Arts has published an Innovation Strategy which purports to constitute 'a coordinated approach to supporting creativity as one of Australia's most valuable assets' (Australia Council 2006).
However, despite this prima facie policy commitment to supporting and fostering innovation in the arts and cultural industries, there remains a disconnect between cultural and innovation policies in Australia. On the one hand, cultural policies in Australia are confused and incoherent in their approach to cultural innovation, and many policy settings as they apply to cultural industries are antithetical to the aims of fostering innovation and R&D. Meanwhile, innovation policies continue to pay only marginal attention to the creative arts and cultural industries. This disconnect will be briefly examined in three fields of cultural policy: arts and cultural funding; copyright and intellectual property policy; and broadcast media policy.
It is argued that rather than promoting innovation, existing policy frameworks in all three areas, when not specifically framed around the protection of vested interests, are often contradictory and inimical to the disruptive influence of innovative artists, technologies and firms. Possible reasons for the disconnect include pragmatic matters of busy ministers and low policy priorities, and conceptual confusion over the status and value of culture."
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The Private Finance Initiative (journal article)
By Anthony Wall and Ciaran Connolly
from Public Management Review Vol 11 Issue 5 Sept 2009, pp. 707 - 724
"This article considers the development of the Private Finance Initiative (PFI) and contends that it is now deeply embedded and intertwined in policies to renew and modernize the United Kingdom's public services. After briefly reviewing prior research based upon the themes proposed by Broadbent and Laughlin (1999), this article suggests a new research agenda to reflect how the PFI has matured and developed in recent years."
Government Subsidies for Professional Team Sports in Australia (journal article)
By John K. Wilson and Richard Pomfret
from Australian Economic Review Vol 42 Iss 3 2009, pp. 264 - 275
"Professional team sports represent an important aspect of Australian life. Interest is great, and a significant portion of household expenditure is directed toward sports-related goods and services. Based on international comparisons and on the size of attendance and television revenues, the sector should be highly profitable. Yet, significant amounts of public funding and regulatory exemptions are afforded to team sports in Australia. This article analyses the magnitude and reasons for government spending that subsidises professional team sports."
What Happened to Australia's Productivity Surge? (journal article)
By Ben Dolman
from Australian Economic Review Vol 42 Iss 3 2009, pp. 243 - 263
"Australia's productivity has grown 1 percentage point per year slower in the current decade than in the 1990s. This article shows that almost one-half of the slowdown is related to unusual developments in the mining industry, the effects of drought and the overstatement of productivity growth in the 1990s. Part of the remainder might be as a result of a combination of slower technological change, unmeasured declines in labour quality, the diminishing effects of past reforms and the increasing profitability of Australian firms."
Prolonged sitting linked to premature death (article)
by Angela Dorizas
from Government News, 27/08/2009
"Australian workers are risking their health through prolonged sitting, according to a landmark study. The Stand Up Australia study was a collaboration of Baker IDI Heart and Diabetes Institute, Medibank Private and the Cancer Prevention Research Centre at The University of Queensland. Using accelerometers and self-reporting, Stand Up Australia monitored activity levels of 131 Medibank Private and partner organisation employees in office, call centre and retail environments. The study found that on average 77 per cent of work time was spent sitting."
The New Marketing (journal article)
by Melissa Wilkinson
from Management Today September 2009
"In the glory days of mass consumption, marketing was about getting consumers to believe they didn't just want the latest and greatest product, they actually needed it. In a robust economy fuelled by excess and greed, consumers couldn't resist being swept up in the wave of campaigns promoting 'bigger, better, faster and newer'.
It was relatively easy for marketers to push products in an environment where consumers could afford to regularly replace and upgrade their goods. The job of marketing was to simply generate awareness and sell products; adding value to consumers was unimportant."
