2008

Current government and business policy has forced regional Australia to adjust to the national deregulation of industries on which regional communities have become highly dependent. Adjustment is proving difficult with many regional communities struggling as the economic, social and educational core of the town and district falters ....

High rates of alcohol consumption are common in rural and remote areas of Australia, and there is a lack of support services to reduce alcohol-related harm in these areas. This paper describes some of the issues facing rural and remote communities in Victoria in relation to alcohol-related harms, and explores the range of practical ....

Regional development has emerged as a concern in the reassessment of the role of universities in the global knowledge economy.  The capacity and ability of universities to meet this challenge, however, is shaped by the context in which universities work, including the evolving politics of national systems of regulation, intellectual and acad ....

The choice of policy mechanisms for encouraging environmentally beneficial land-use change should depend on the relative levels of private (or internal) net benefits, and public (or external) net benefits. A map of recommended policy mechanisms is developed, depending on the relative levels of these variables. Positive incentives, negative incent ....

While there was a relative lull in the late 1990s, Queensland's population growth has resumed its earlier rapidity. In the past the main driver was immigration from other states, chiefly New South Wales and, to a lesser extent, Victoria. Now overseas immigration to Queensland is growing fast and it, together with natural increase, ....

Skills shortages have reinvigorated ongoing debate and concern about high attrition rates among Australian apprentices and trainees. Low apprentice and trainee wages have often been cited to explain this ongoing problem. This paper discusses the factors contributing to non-completion among apprentices and trainees in regional Victo ....

North Queensland has the highest rates of skin cancer in the world. Local Government Authorities (LGAs) are ideally placed to provide recreational facilities that protect the population from ultraviolet radiation. In 2005, consistent with outcomes proposed within the Queensland Skin Cancer Prevention Strategic Plan 2001-2005, the N ....

While much attention has been given to attracting and retaining professionals in rural areas generally (particularly doctors and allied health professionals), there has been very little research undertaken in Australia which looks specifically at the problems of recruitment and retention of lawyers in rural, regional and remote (RR ....

For sometime it has been recognised that there is a maldistribution of GPs, favouring metropolitan areas and disadvantaging country areas. This problem also exists in a number of other developed countries. There has been extensive research carried out in Australia as well as the US, UK, and Canada on how to attract and retain GPs i ....

A report on impacts and policy issues.What are the challenges and opportunities as more new arrivals settle in rural and regional Victoria? This report documents contemporary trends in rural and regional settlement, looks at the findings of recent evaluations of national and international experience, and proposes some key policy di ....

The current economic expansion has been broadly-based across the states, with unemployment around multi-decade lows in all states and territories. While growth rates in Western Australia and Queensland have been the highest in the country in recent years, the divergences between the states narrowed somewhat over 2007, with high growth rates being ....

The election of Helen Clark's centre-left Labour Government in New Zealand in 1999 saw the reemergence of regional development as a key national policy. Prior to this New Zealand had seen 15 years of 'new right' economics and politics where central government intervention in areas such as regional development was not favoured. Whil ....

This paper analyses the efficacy of regional and federal government policies in reducing inter-regional unemployment disparities. We use as our framework a two-region general equilibrium model with a given freely-mobile supply of labour. We assume interregional migration to occur in response to inter-regional utility differentials. Each region ha ....

The design of regulations to mitigate environmental externalities poses numerous challenges, including risk and uncertainty, information asymmetries, and complex and heterogeneous ecosystems. This research addresses a subset of these challenges within three distinct contexts: (1) agricultural production, (2) urban sprawl, and (3) exhaus ....