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Recommended Readings and Articles

  • The importance of resiliency to your career

    Yu Dan Shi's picture

    Why do some people suffer extreme adversity in their professional career and not stumble, while others never recover after some setbacks?

  • Civil and Political Rights: 'Political Development' (Routledge, 2007), Chapter 5

    Damien KingsburyRecognition and acceptance of civil and political rights are perhaps the key marker of liberalization, and demonstrate the extent to which transition from an authoritarian or non-democratic regime has taken place.

  • Subsidies increase child care prices, not mothers participation in work

    Jennifer BuckinghamAs costs go up, the demand for increased subsidies on childcare intensifies and the cycle continues. Such a pattern of inflationary spending is unsustainable, and according to the evidence, ineffective.

    The relationship between child care and the participation of mothers in the paid workforce seems obvious: if child care was more affordable, more mothers would work. Indeed, it seems so obvious that this statement is repeatedly made without providing any supporting evidence.

    Governments have embraced this argument. But statistical and empirical evidence on the strength of the association between female labour-force participation and the cost of child care tell a somewhat different story.

    National statistics on child care spending and female labour force participation rates suggest that the relationship works in the opposite direction. Most of the increase in labour force participation rates of women aged 25-34 and 35-44 occurred during the 1980s, while government spending on child care escalated in the 1990s.

  • Australia As A Pacemaker: Regulating For Competitive Outcomes

    John MartinOn 26 September John Martin presented these ideas at the GAP Congress on Regulatory Affairs: "Opportunities for Business",  held in Parliament House of Victoria.

    Regulation that fosters market competition by definition must be good for business opportunity. On the other hand market arrangements that cultivate cartels and other anti competitive are anathema to innovation. 

    The Trade Practices Act 1974 (TPA) is a unique "animal" in setting a low intervention framework for policing anti-competitive arrangements and unfair trading practices to protect individual and business consumers.

    Unlike some other areas of regulation of business behaviour, there is not a requirement for businesses to regularly report to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) in its role administering the TPA.  Enforcement and compliance actions by the Commission are driven by specific complaints or identification of concerns in a particular sector. The ACCC handles 80,000 plus complaints and enquiries per year.