In the past year the 'war against terror' and perceptions of state failure within the post-colonial Pacific have sparked an Australian-led initiative to deepen and widen regional integration in Oceania. Greg Fry argues that behind the seeming unanimity of the 2004 Auckland Declaration and agreement by Pacific Islands Forum leaders on a 'Pacific vision' and...

Aydogan Ulker analyses the role of the elderly couples' past marital history in determining their current wealth holdings and portfolio allocation using data from the first wave of the Health and Retirement Study. The results suggest that, while the net cost of divorce in terms of household wealth accumulation is higher for men than it...

Patricia Apps, Ray Rees and Elizabeth Savage analyse the Howard government's recent Medicare reform. {C} Using models of the physician's behaviour and of a household's demand for medical insurance under the proposed system, they argue that those most likely to be made worse off are low income households with children, though a full evaluation of...

Government subsidies have provided a major source of funds to private schools in Australia for three decades. The increasing level of private school subsidies since the mid-1970s has contributed to a steady increase in the proportion of students enrolled in private schools. This growth in the private school share of enrolments was not inevitable, but...

Prior to the last three decades, regular surveys on household income were rare or nonexistent in many developed countries, making it difficult for economists to compare income distribution in the long run. Using taxation statistics, which tend to be available over a longer time span, Andrew Leigh propose a method for imputing the incomes of...