Australian carbon biosequestration and bioenergy policy co-evolution: mechanisms, mitigation and convergence

The intricacies of international land-use change and forestry policy reflect the temporal, technical and political difficulty of integrating biological systems and climate change mitigation. The plethora of co-existing policies with varied technical rules, accreditation requirements, accounting methods, market registries, etc., disguise the unequal efficacies of each mechanism. This work explores the co-evolution and convergence of Australian voluntary and mandatory climate-related policies at the biosequestration-bioenergy interface. Currently, there are temporal differences between the fast-evolving and precise climate-change mechanisms, and the long-term 'permanence' sought from land use changes encouraged by biosequestration instruments. Policy convergence that favours the most efficient, appropriate and scientifically substantiated policy mechanisms is required. These policies must recognise the fundamental biological foundation of biosequestration, bioenergy, biomaterial industrial development and other areas such as food security and environmental concerns. Policy mechanisms that provide administrative simplicity, project longevity and market certainty are necessary for rural and regional Australians to cost-effectively harness the considerable climate change mitigation potential of biological systems

Diverse, remote and innovative - Prospects for a globally unique electricity network and market in Western Australia

WA’s electricity industry supply infrastructure comprises the South West Inter-connected System (SWIS), the North West Interconnected System (NWIS) and 29 regional noninterconnected power systems 1. WA exhibits a diversity of generation systems located in some of the most isolated regions of Australia, supplying a wide range of energy demand profiles. These characteristics and the unique networks that comprises WA’s electricity infrastructure makes WA a unique place to research, develop and integrate new technical options within a world-class industrialised electricity system

The effect of systematic misperception of income on the subjective poverty line

Income Distribution;macroeconomics

The taxation of discrete investment choices

Traditional analysis of the taxation of income from capital has focused on the impact of tax on marginal investment decisions; the principal impact of tax on investment is through the cost of capital, and is generally measured by an effective marginal tax rate. In this paper, we consider cases in which investors face a choice between two or more mutually exclusive projects, both of which are expected to earn at least the minimum required rate of return. Examples include the location decisions of multinationals, firms' choice of technology, and the choice of investment projects in the presence of binding financial constraints. In these cases the choice depends on the effective average tax rate. We propose a measure of this rate and demonstrate its relationship to the conventional effective marginal tax rate. Estimates of both are presented and compared for domestic and international investment in Germany, Japan, the UK and USA between 1979 and 1997

Noncooperative Bargaining in Apex Games and the Kernel

This paper studies non-cooperative bargaining with random proposers in apex games. Two di¤erent protocols are considered: the egalitarian propocol, which selects each player to be the proposer with the same probability, and the proportional protocol, which selects each player with a probability proportional to his number of votes. Expected equilibrium payo¤s coincide with the kernel for the grand coalition regardless of the protocol. Expected payo¤s conditional on a coalition may depend on the protocol: given a coalition of the apex player with a minor player, an egalitarian protocol yields a nearly equal split whereas a proportional protocol leads to a proportional split.noncooperative bargaining;apex games;kernel;random proposers

Age-dependent failure modelling: A Hazard-function approach

Reliability;Ageing;Hazard Function

Two-Stage Bargaining with Reversible Coalitions: The Case of Apex Games

This paper studies coalition formation and payoff division in apex games under the following assumptions: first, payoff division can only be agreed upon after the coalition has formed (two-stage bargaining); second, negotiations in the coalition can break down, in which case a new coalition may be formed (reversible coalitions).In contrast with the results of other two-stage models, all minimal winning coalitions may form and expected payoffs coincide with the per capita nucleolus.These results are robust to the details of the bargaining procedure.Surprisingly, having a two-stage process (rather than a one-stage process with simultaneous coalition formation and payoff division) benefits the apex player.bargaining;game theory;coalition

Promising Areas for Future Research on Reverse Logistics: an exploratory study

During the early nineties, the Council of Logistics Management started publishing studieswhere Reverse Logistics was recognized as being relevant both for business and society (Stock,1992). Other studies followed stressing the opportunities on reuse and recycling (Kopicki etal., 1993), discussing marketing aspects (Kostecki, 1998) and reported on the U.S. experience(Rogers and Tibben-Lembke, 1999). In Europe, an inter-university EU sponsored projectcalled RevLog had served as one of the motors for European Research on Reverse Logistics.For the last 5 years, researchers associated with RevLog have co-authored more than 100papers on the subject (see Dekker et al., 2003). Very recently, the RevLog group organizeda meeting to identify ?Promising Areas for Future Research on Reverse Logistics.? In thispaper we report the outcome of such meeting.reverse logistics;exploratory study;future;nominal group technique

Singularity, complexity, and quasi--integrability of rational mappings

We investigate global properties of the mappings entering the description of symmetries of integrable spin and vertex models, by exploiting their nature of birational transformations of projective spaces. We give an algorithmic analysis of the structure of invariants of such mappings. We discuss some characteristic conditions for their (quasi)--integrability, and in particular its links with their singularities (in the 2--plane). Finally, we describe some of their properties {\it qua\/} dynamical systems, making contact with Arnol'd's notion of complexity, and exemplify remarkable behaviours.Comment: Latex file. 17 pages. To appear in CM