Will-making prevalence and patterns in Australia: Keeping it in the family

This article provides evidence of the prevalence of wills and the principles underpinning the intended distribution of estates in Australia. Intentions around wealth transfers and the social norms that underpin them occur in the context of predicted extensive intergenerational transfers from the ageing baby boomer generation, policies of self provision and user pays for care in old age, broader views on what constitutes ‘family’, the increased importance of the not-for-profit sector in the delivery of services, and the related need for philanthropy. A national telephone survey conducted in 2012 with 2,405 respondents aged 18 and over shows that wills are predominantly used to distribute assets to partners and/or equally to immediate descendants. There is little evidence that will makers are recognising a wider group of relationships, obligations and entitlements outside the traditional nuclear family, or that wills are being replaced by other mechanisms of wealth transfer. Only a minority consider bequests to charities as important. These findings reflect current social norms about entitlements to ‘family’ money, a narrow view of what and who constitutes ‘family’, limited obligation for testators to recompense individuals or organisations for care and support provided, and limited commitment to charitable organisations and civil society.

A strong lightweight authentication protocol for low-cost RFID systems

RFID is an important technology that can be used to create the ubiquitous society. But an RFID system uses open radio frequency signal to transfer information and this leads to pose many serious threats to its privacy and security. In general, the computing and storage resources in an RFID tag are very limited and this makes it difficult to solve its secure and private problems, especially for low-cost RFID tags. In order to ensure the security and privacy of low-cost RFID systems we propose a lightweight authentication protocol based on Hash function. This protocol can ensure forward security and prevent information leakage, location tracing, eavesdropping, replay attack and spoofing. This protocol completes the strong authentication of the reader to the tag by twice authenticating and it only transfers part information of the encrypted tag’s identifier for each session so it is difficult for an adversary to intercept the whole identifier of a tag. This protocol is simple and it takes less computing and storage resources, it is very suitable to some low-cost RFID systems.

Making and changing wills: Prevalence, predictors, and triggers

Wills are important social, economic, and legal documents. Yet little is known about current will making practices and intentions. A comprehensive national database on the prevalence of will making in Australia was developed to identify who is or is not most likely to draw up a will and triggers for making and changing wills. A national survey of 2,405 adults aged above 18 years was administered by telephone in August and September 2012. Fifty-nine percent of the Australian adult population has a valid will, and the likelihood of will making increases with age and estate value. Efforts to get organized, especially in combination with life stage and asset changes trigger will making; procrastination, rather than a strong resistance, appears to explain not making a will. Understanding will making is timely in the context of predicted significant intergenerational transfers of wealth, changing demographics, and a renewed emphasis on retirement planning.

Altruism, Trade Policy, and the Optimality of Foreign Aid

There are many studies in the literature that deal with the welfare effects of income transfers between nations in a general equilibrium setting. An important impetus for this extensive literature was the demonstration of the transfer paradox; that the donor country could actually gain from a transfer of income to another, and that the recipient could lose as a result of the gift. The reason for this paradoxical result is that the transfer gives rise to a terms-of-trade effect that may be especially beneficial to the donor and detrimental to the recipient. Subsequently, many papers have established conditions under which this paradox will or will not occur. Early work by Samuelson (1954) was followed by demonstrations of paradoxes by Gale (1974), Ohyama (1974), Brecher and Bhagwati (1982) and Bhagwati, Brecher and Hatta 1983, 1985, and Dixit (1983)) among others.1 More recently, many studies have examined whether or not foreign aid — tied and untied — can be welfare improving for both the donor and the recipient (see, for example, Turunen-Red and Woodland (1988), Kemp and Wong (1993), Schweinberger (1990), Hatzipanayotou and Michael (1995), Lahiri and Raimondos-Moller 1995, 1997, Djajić, Lahiri and Raimondos-Møller 1996a, 1996b, and Lahiri, Raimondos-Møller, Wong and Woodland 1997.2

Non-preferential trading clubs

This paper examines the welfare implications of non-discriminatory tariff reforms by a subset of countries, which we term a non-preferential trading club. We show that there exist coordinated tariff reforms, accompanied by appropriate income transfers between the member countries, that unambiguously increase the welfare of these countries while leaving the welfare of non-members unaltered. In terms of economic policy implications, our results show that there exist regional, MFN-consistent arrangements that lead to Pareto improvements in world welfare.