This submission to the federal government's Higher Education Review recommends a complete overhaul of the structure and financing model of tertiary education in Australia in order to increase participation in post secondary education and deepen the skills base of those already in the workforce. The submission argues that if Australia aspires to perform among the...

Under Indonesia's anti-poverty program, IDT, the government provided selected poor villages with grants of the same value, regardless of population size. Exploiting the variation in per household grant value that is caused by this program design, the author estimates the returns to public grants, which are designated for investment loans. Results show that the returns...

Users' bandwidth demands continue to increase over time and this is leading internet service providers and telecommunication operators to find ways to meet these growing network capacity requirements. Operators have spent 20 years extending fibre backbones out to local main distribution frames but now many are working on pushing fibre ever closer to end-users in...

The behaviour of aggregate Australian private business investment has attracted relatively little attention in the literature over the past decade or so, probably reflecting the well-known difficulties associated with modelling it. This paper reviews the main drivers of Australian business investment through a discussion of some long- and short-run trends and estimation of error-correction models...

Getting the long-term jobless into mainstream employment is a major challenge for Australian governments, especially in areas of concentrated disadvantage. The Brotherhood’s approach, also used effectively overseas, is to use an 'intermediate labour market' (ILM) as a bridge between long-term unemployment and the mainstream labour market. This research report presents initial findings about the effectiveness...