A decision support process to compare Riparian revegetation options in Scheu Creek catchment in North Queensland

While riparian vegetation can play a major role in protecting land, water and natural habitat in catchments, there are high costs associated with tree planting and establishment and in diverting land from cropping. The distribution of costs and benefits of riparian revegetation creates conflicts in the objectives of various stakeholder groups. Multicriteria analysis provides an appropriate tool to evaluate alternative riparian revegetation options, and to accommodate the conflicting views of various stakeholder groups. This paper discusses an application of multicriteria analysis in an evaluation of riparian revegetation policy options for Scheu Creek, a small sub-catchment in the Johnstone River catchment in north Queensland, Australia. Clear differences are found in the rankings of revegetation options for different stakeholder groups with respect to environmental, social and economic impacts. Implementation of a revegetation option will involve considerable cost for landholders for the benefits of society. Queensland legislation does not provide a means to require farmers to implement riparian revegetation, hence the need for subsidies, tau incentives and moral suasion. (C) 2001 Academic Press.

Knowledge and markets

An economy is a coordinated system of distributed knowledge. Economic evolution occurs as knowledge grows and the structure of the system changes. This paper is about the role of markets in this process. Traditionally, the theory of markets has not been a central feature of evolutionary economics. This seems to be due to the orthodox view of markets as information-processing mechanisms for finding equilibria. But in economic evolution markets are actually knowledge-structuring mechanisms. What then is the relation between knowledge, information, markets and mechanisms? I argue that an evolutionary theory of markets, in the manner of Loasby (1999), requires a clear formulation of these relations. I suggest that a conception of knowledge and markets in terms of a graphical theory of complex systems furnishes precisely this.

Auditor independence and fee dependence

This study investigates whether fee dependence within the audit firms' offices jeopardises auditor independence. Fee dependence is examined at both the national audit firm level as well as the local office level and in a setting where public disclosure of fees is mandatory. We focus our tests on audit fee dependence and at the same time we control for the effects of non-audit service fee dependence post the 1989 mergers. We operationalise the exercise of independent judgement in auditing by the propensity to issue qualified audit opinions. If fee dependence affects auditors' independent judgement, then auditors are less likely to qualify the accounts. The study's results show that the level of auditor fee dependence does not affect auditor propensity to issue unqualified audit opinions. The findings remain robust to a number of sensitivity tests including the analyses controlling for the effects of non-audit service fee dependence and other settings in which there is heightened pressure on auditors to confront the effects of fee dependence on exercising independent audit judgement. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.