In my first public service job, on my way to my desk on the sixth floor of the Neville Bonner Building in Brisbane I’d walk past a photo portrait of Colin Clark, a former head of the Queensland Employment, Training and IR department in an earlier incarnation many decades before. It was a daily reminder of the extraordinary career of a man who made outstanding contributions to national income accounting, the study of economic development and the practical economic management and development of Queensland in the late 1930s and the 1940s. His national income estimates for Britain were used by Maynard Keynes in his General Theory, and the great man considered Clark “quite first-class.”
The University of Queensland’s annual Colin Clark lecture hence deserves a distinguished speaker and this year it certainly has one, Professor Ross Garnaut. This is a must attend event on a very important topic:
GLOBAL COOPERATION ON CLIMATE CHANGE MITIGATION: IS AGREEMENT NECESSARY?
Presented by Professor Ross Garnaut, Vice-Chancellor’s Fellow and Professorial Fellow, University of Melbourne and Distinguished Professor, Australian National University.
Abstract: The world failed in its first approach to international cooperation on climate change mitigation: comprehensive agreement on allocation of national responsibilities to achieve an agreed objective. In 2010, a different approach was adopted by default: bottom-up unilateral action disciplined by peer review. This lecture examines the economics and the international relations of the new approach. Along the way, it assesses the economics of Australian policy in the light of international action.
WHEN
Tuesday, 11 September, 2012
12:00 PM – 2:30 PM
While growth in the ABS trend estimate is positive, this could change if there are another few months of low approvals. I’ve never had much confidence in ABS trend measures because they are basically backward-looking moving averages.
Queensland Economy Watch 