Several studies have examined trends in mean temperatures in the Australian (e.g. Coughlan 1979; Torok and Nicholls 1996), New Zealand (e.g. Salinger 1995) and southwest Pacific (e.g. Salinger 1995) regions. In recent years additional papers have also investigated temporal trends in temperature extremes and, in a few cases, temperature variability (e.g. Collins et al. 2000; Manton et al. 2001; ...

These are three quite different papers, from very different perspectives. John Quiggin adopts a micro approach; Warwick McKibbin’s views are informed by research on optimal policy regimes in large-scale macro models, while Peter Stemp’s comments are mainly based on the literature which deals with institutional structure and incentives for monetary policy. I want to respond to a couple of points...

Measuring and comparing performance in local government is controversial for good reasons. When these initiatives expand beyond purely academic considerations and are implemented in practice, several unintended consequences are likely to arise. These include an excessive focus on particular aspects of governance, strategic responses to maximise scores, unaccounted effects of exogenous variables...

The current state-of-the-art in flood damage analysis mainly focuses on the economic evaluation of tangible flood effects. It is contended in this discussion paper that important economic, social and ecological aspects of flood-related vulnerabilities are neglected. It is a challenge for flood research to develop a wider perspective for flood damage evaluation.

During the past year the Bank has continued to conduct research on a range of issues related to its areas of policy responsibility. Some of the major themes in 1996 were monetary policy and inflation, the behaviour of financial markets, international macroeconomic linkages, and developments in the Australian financial system. Results of this research are made available to the public in a number...

This note summarizes the results of a study of the identification of theH !WW !`` ` `0 signal for MH 0 = 170 GeV/c. This study is motivated by the papers written by M. Dittmar and H. Dreiner [1][2]. We carried out a similar study using Pythia to generate events and CMSIM calorimeter simulation for the jet veto, and compared with their results. We also show some comparison between Pythia and IS...