130,782 research outputs found
Growth in densely populated Asia: implications for primary product exporters
No full textEconomic growth and integration in Asia is rapidly increasing the global economic importance of the region. To the extent that this growth continues and is strongest in natural resource-poor Asian economies, it will add to global demand for imports of primary products, to the benefit of (especially nearby) resource-abundant countries. How will global production, consumption and trade patterns change by 2030 in the course of such economic developments and structural changes? We address this question using the GTAP model and Version 8.1 of the 2007 GTAP database, together with supplementary data from a range of sources, to support projections of the global economy from 2007 to 2030 under various scenarios. Factor endowments and real gross domestic product are assumed to grow at exogenous rates, and trade-related policies are kept unchanged to generate a core baseline, which is compared with an alternative slower growth scenario. We also consider the impact of several policy changes aimed at increasing China's agricultural self-sufficiency relative to the 2030 baseline. Policy implications for countries of the Asia-Pacific region are drawn out in the final section
Tariff Rate Quotas and New Zealand’s Meat and Dairy Trade
Get PDFThe tariff rate quota (TRQ) system was formalised in the Uruguay Round with the aim of maintaining and improving market access for agricultural products. Under this system, a lower tariff rate is applied to imports up to the quota limit, with a higher (and often prohibitive) tariff rate levied on products imported beyond this quota. However, the success of the TRQ system has been limited, with dairy and meat products in particular still facing relatively high barriers to international trade. In this paper, we examine the impact of the TRQ system on New Zealand’s meat and dairy trade. We draw together theoretical and empirical insights and present preliminary findings arising from interviews with key stakeholders. In particular, we examine whether the TRQ system has achieved its objectives from the perspective of the dairy and meat sectors in New Zealand and we analyse problems that appear to exist with the system. We also examine implications of reform of the TRQ system, including lower in- and over-quota rates, increased quota limits and more transparent and efficient administration methods.Agribusiness, Agricultural and Food Policy, Crop Production/Industries, Environmental Economics and Policy, Farm Management, International Relations/Trade, Land Economics/Use, Livestock Production/Industries,
Manuscript notes on gold digging and gold licence issued 1858
Get PDFManuscript notes on gold digging, written around [c.1858] author unknown, may have been George Elliot. Includes on the front page a coloured drawing of 'The Diggings, designed and drawn by William Strutt, and published by D. Urquhart, Collins Street, Melbourne.
William Strutt (1825-1915) was born in Devon, England and studied art in Paris. He arrived in Melbourne on the HMS Culloden, in July 1850. Strutt published engravings in the first issue of the Illustrated Australian Magazine and designed, engraved or lithographed postage stamps, posters, maps, transparencies and seals and began to learn all he could about the history of the colony. His friend and patron John Pasco Fawkner encouraged him to record important colonial events. His works are represented in galleries in Sydney, Melbourne, Ballarat, Adelaide and Hobart. Among European collections, le Musée de Lucerne and the Peace Palace at The Hague hold important paintings. The Dixson and Mitchell libraries, Sydney, the National Library of Australia, State Library and the Parliamentary Library, Victoria, and the Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, all hold extensive collections of his sketches, paintings or manuscript material.
Also Gold Licence issued to George Elliot on October 1858 by P.C.. Crespigny, Commissioner. To meet the expense of securing order and to restrain unauthorised mining on Crown land, a local Act of January 1852 imposed on all diggers a licence fee of 30 shillings per month, the penalty for mining without a licence being £6 for the first offence and afterwards imprisonment for terms up to six months
: Presented to The Royal Society of Tasmania by George Elliot.
RS 70/ 1&
Challenges of port landscapes: integrating geophysics, open area excavation and computer graphic visualisation at Portus and the Isola Sacra
No full textReport of the inquiry into the loss of Autosub2 under the Fimbulisen
Get PDFThe Board of inquiry into the loss of Autosub2 under the Fimbulisen found that the loss was caused by a technical systems failure on the AUV. A comprehensive analysis was made of the technical reasons for the loss. However, because it was not possible to recover the AUV from under the ice shelf for direct examination, it was not possible to identify the actual cause of loss. Consequently an assessment was made of the likelihood of different failure modes causing the loss. The results of this analysis suggest that the loss was equally likely to have come about from an Abort Command (AC) as a Loss of Power (LP). A root cause analysis was performed which indicated that the source of the failure was most likely to have been a fault introduced during the manufacturing/assembly phase (52%), followed by Maintenance (25%). Design error was considered less likely (14%) while Operations (7%) and External factors (1%) were considered least likely.This analysis indicates that the greatest benefits to reliability improvements are most likely to come from attention to faults originating in the manufacturing and assembly stage, followed by attention to faults arising from maintenance activities. Due to the large numbers of connections and leakage paths, it is necessary to pay particular attention to the reliability of electrical connectors and harnesses. A high level of quality assurance in manufacture and assembly is required to achieve an acceptable level of system reliability.While it was accepted that the development team at NOC had adopted sound engineering practices in the development of the AUV and that reliability considerations had informed design decisions, the design team had no formally implemented reliability or technical risk assessment procedures to support design decision making. This was considered to be a major management weakness
Benchmarking risk management practice within the water utility sector
Get PDFExplicit approaches to risk analysis within the water utility sector, traditionally
applied to occupational health and safety and public health protection, are now seeing
broader application in contexts including corporate level decision making, asset
management, watershed protection and network reliability. Our research suggested that
neither the development of novel risk analysis techniques nor the refinement of existing
ones was of paramount importance in improving the capabilities of water utilities to
manage risk. It was thought that a more fruitful approach would be to focus on the
implementation of risk management rather than the techniques employed per se.
Thus, we developed a prescriptive capability maturity model for benchmarking
the maturity of implementation of water utility risk management practice, and applied it
to the sector via case study and benchmarking survey. We observed risk management
practices ranging from the application of hazard and operability studies, to the use of
scenario planning in guiding organisational restructuring programmes. We observed
methods for their institutionalisation, including the use of initiation criteria for applying
risk analysis techniques; the adoption of formalised procedures to guide their
application; and auditing and peer reviews to ensure procedural compliance and provide
quality assurance.
We then built upon this research to develop a descriptive1 capability maturity
model of utility risk analysis and risk based decision making practice, and described its
case study application. The contribution to knowledge of this stage of the research was
three-fold, we: synthesized empirical observations with behavioral and normative theories to codify the processes of risk analysis and risk based decision making; placed
these processes within a maturity framework which distinguishes their relative maturity
of implementation from ad hoc to adaptive; and provided a comparative analysis of risk
analysis and risk based decision making practices, and their maturity of
implementation, across a range of utility functions.
The research provides utility managers, technical staff, project managers and
chief finance officers with a practical and systematic understanding of how to
implement and improve risk management, and offers preliminary guidance to regulators
concerning how improved water utility governance can be made real
MeSH term explosion and author rank improve expert recommendations
Get PDFInformation overload is an often-cited phenomenon that reduces the productivity, efficiency and efficacy of scientists. One challenge for scientists is to find appropriate collaborators in their research. The literature describes various solutions to the problem of expertise location, but most current approaches do not appear to be very suitable for expert recommendations in biomedical research. In this study, we present the development and initial evaluation of a vector space model-based algorithm to calculate researcher similarity using four inputs: 1) MeSH terms of publications; 2) MeSH terms and author rank; 3) exploded MeSH terms; and 4) exploded MeSH terms and author rank. We developed and evaluated the algorithm using a data set of 17,525 authors and their 22,542 papers. On average, our algorithms correctly predicted 2.5 of the top 5/10 coauthors of individual scientists. Exploded MeSH and author rank outperformed all other algorithms in accuracy, followed closely by MeSH and author rank. Our results show that the accuracy of MeSH term-based matching can be enhanced with other metadata such as author rank
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