The Reserve Bank of Australia has created a new index for uncertainty in the Australian economy based on news, financial indicators and economic variables.
Managing the risks of industry-researcher collaboration: Coca-Cola got caught for funding scientists who shifted blame for obesity away from bad diets.
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The innovation report fails to mention the risk of bias for researchers collaborating with industry. We must ensure that researchers maintain their independence.
Greater choice and control leads to better outcomes and more efficient use of funding.
Federico Rostagno/Shutterstock
Would politicians have the courage to stand up to backlash if people with disability use their care money to pay for overseas holidays, sex workers, internet dating, or tickets to sporting events?
Jacob Zuma speaking at the Union Buildings in Pretoria. Adversarial policymaking is taking root in South Africa, where new proposals are increasingly being fought in the media and the courts.
Reuters/Skyler Reid
Too many new laws in South Africa are poorly thought through at the policy formulation stage. The new Socio-economic Impact Assessment will need rigorously support throughout government to succeed.
Like other middle-income economies, South Africa suffers from a high rate of unemployment and an under-skilled workforce.
Reuters/Siphiwe Sibeko
South Africa’s lack of a clear policy direction, poor leadership, corruption and electricity supply problems will be the major constraints to its economic growth over the next 20 years.
By backing a new Charter for Budget Responsibility, the main political parties in Britain want to persuade you that they’re legally obliged to balance the books within three years. Fortunately, it’s not…
Christopher Pyne argues that the government is on the side of history in reforming higher education, but it is a bad history that he evokes.
AAP/Lukas Coch
After the defeat of the Abbott government’s higher education bills in the Senate, Education Minister Christopher Pyne invoked the legacy of past “reforms” that had been violently contested at the time…
Since 1990, GDP per person in China has doubled and then redoubled. With average incomes multiplying fourfold in little more than two decades, one might expect many of the Chinese people to be dancing…
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) Fifth Assessment Report tells us that CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions are continuing to rise and that, unchecked, climate change will likely…
E-cigarettes are increasingly popular in a number of countries including the UK, while in others such as Norway and Brazil they are banned altogether. So amid all these differences in policy, what do we…
Roll up, roll up! Alcohol still going cheap.
Sang Tan/AP
The British Medical Journal’s investigation into the role played by the alcohol industry in public health policy focuses on the government’s decision to drop its commitment to introduce a minimum unit…
Stories about “population ageing” often have a number of things in common – it is bad, it is new, and it will overwhelm us all. The major fear is a burden of cost and caring that more older people will…
If you follow the debate on “population ageing” you could be forgiven for thinking that it is a bad thing; growing numbers of older people mean greying societies, struggling to maintain pensions, welfare…
Walter Holland, London School of Economics and Political Science
The introduction of scientific principles into government decision-making began with the publication of the Haldane Report in 1918. Haldane believed that research should play a key role in government and…
Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull speaks during the launch of economist Ross Garnaut’s book at the National Press Club in Canberra.
Lukas Coch/AAP
Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull has called for politicians to take up their “megaphones” to explain policy and argue for reforms. Launching the book Dog Days: Australia After the Boom, by leading…
If advice isn’t acted upon, is it good advice?
kevincollins123
Without good advice, governments are in extreme danger of creating erroneous or damaging public policy. So it’s a serious matter when a government science adviser is accused of ignoring scientific evidence…
Martin Ferguson, Julia Gillard and Wayne Swan announced the MRRT in 2010 … but three ministers and three miners do not a policy make.
AAP/Alan Porritt
Most controversial public policy could be said to be made on the run, or at least amended on a brisk walk. So the revelations in Peter Martin’s recent article on the errors embedded in the Gillard government’s…
Professor of Economics, Department of Economics, Deakin Business School and Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation, Deakin University