Primary 2007 Research Programs

Inframarginal General Equilibrium Theory of International Trade

The Centre is currently undertaking an effort to consolidate its contributions toward the development of an inframarginal general equilibrium theory of international trade. Several members of the Centre are involved in this program. Wenli Cheng and Dingsheng Zhang are working on global outsourcing, and Christis Tombazos on the likelihood of global production within the cone of diversification. Several contributions by members of the Centre have been published over the last few years, others are currently under submission at leading international journals, or well underway.

Increasing Returns and Economic Efficiency

This program led by Yew-Kwang Ng is to advance understanding of the problem of economic efficiency in the presence of increasing returns by considering organizational efficiency in addition to the allocational efficiency emphasised in the traditional framework. It concentrates on an effort to integrate the Dixit-Stiglitz model of increasing returns with the Yang-Ng-Shi model of new classical economics to provide a realistic analysis that allows for increasing returns in both home and firm/market production. This conceptual extension constitutes an advance that is of considerable analytical value and will also be relevant for the formulation of public economic policy in the Australian setting and also more generally.

Valuing Life and Time in the Knowledge Economy

This program concentrates on a New Classical reconciliation of a burgeoning research on valuation of life, time, and health with particular emphasis on the effects of aging and the accumulation of knowledge. The program is expected to generate new insights and important welfare and policy implications, which are especially of interest to a knowledge economy like Australia , in which the demographic profile is experiencing a fundamental shift toward unprecedented high percentage of the aged population.