Least-Cost Planning and electricity industry reform in Australia

Least-Cost Planning played a key role in the development of the energy efficiency and renewable energy industries in the USA, It has not been widely used elsewhere, largely due to differences in other nations' regulatory environments and the emergence of competitive markets as the dominant paradigm for electricity planning, Least-Cost Planning, however may over valuable insights for creating regulatory framework for competitive electricity markers. This paper examines some lessons which may be extracted from an analysis of the Least-Cost Planning experience in the USA and suggests how these lessons might prove beneficial in guiding Australia's electricity industry reform, This analysis demonstrates how market-based reforms may be flawed if they ignore the history of previous reform processes.

The Napster decision : implications for copyright law in the digital age

Challenges posed to copyright law in the digital age is most evident in A and M Records Inc v Napster Inc - the various court rulings indicate that Napster is likely to be held responsible for massive copyright infringement should the case come to a full trial - implications for Australian copyright law, the recording industry and individual artists - globalisation may hinder the ability of the recording industry to prevent mass copyright infringement.

Productivity growth in pre-1990 Mongolian agriculture: Spiralling disaster or emerging success?

The reasons for the spectacular collapse of so many centrally-planned economies are a source of ongoing debate. In this paper, we use detailed farm-level data to measure total factor productivity (TFP) changes in Mongolian grain and potato farming during the 14-year period immediately preceding the 1990 economic reforms. We measure TFP growth using stochastic frontier analysis (SFA) and data envelopment analysis (DEA) methods. Our results indicate quite poor overall performance, with an average annual TFP change of - 1.7% in grain and 0.8% in potatoes, over the 14-year period. However, the pattern of TFP growth changed substantially during this period, with TFP growth exceeding 7% per year in the latter half of this period. This suggests that the new policies of improved education, greater management autonomy, and improved incentives, which were introduced in final two planning periods in the 1980s, were beginning to have a significant influence upon the performance of Mongolian crop farming. Crown Copyright (C) 2002 Published by Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.