14 August 2019

A new way of measuring and cutting red tape with demonstrated success in the United States and Canada is being promoted in Australia by free market think tank the Institute of Public Affairs. A team of researchers from the Mercatus Center at George Mason University in the United States and RMIT University released a new report “RegData Australia” that provides

1 December 2017

Economists explain the far-reaching implications of blockchain technology on society and on how we are governed. A blockchain is a digital, decentralised, distributed ledger. This year saw a meteoric rise in interest in cryptocurrencies and the blockchain technologies that power them. Even the government is now interested. There’s now a Commonwealth Parliamentary Friends of Blockchain group, and one blockchain energy

1 December 2016

 New technology can fix Australia’s ailing health system, but only if     To fix health care and human services – two government programs as egregiously expensive as they are important – we need to solve a basic property rights problem. It’s not a spending issue. It’s not a management flaw. This is a problem of data ownership and we can

1 August 2016

A new exemption class over corporate regulation might be a better approach to innovation policy, write Sean Leaver and Jason Potts There are already a number of different regulatory types of firms available, such as sole-trader, partnerships, private companies and public companies. However, a unique characteristic of start-ups firms is that they are more likely to fail than succeed. There

1 April 2016

Daniel Chirot and Scott Montgomery from the School of International Studies at the University of Washington have telegraphed the Enlightenment into ‘four big ideas’ that they present through the writings of Adam Smith, Karl Marx, Charles Darwin, and the constitutional debates between Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton. The modern world, both its enormous promise and its gravest troubles—from the existential

4 November 2014

This article from the November 2014 edition of the IPA Review is by Adjunct Fellow at the IPA and Professor of Economics at RMIT, Jason Potts. Close your eyes and think about innovation in medicine, or innovation in software design or clean energy, or even innovation in pizza delivery: your frontal lobes will flood with dopamine as you contemplate those new

17 July 2014

This article from the July 2014 edition of the IPA Review is by Senior Fellow at the IPA and Professor of Economics at RMIT, Jason Potts. A standard justification for public funding of arts and culture is market failure. Economists explain that because of ‘uncompensated positive externalities’ or the public good-like nature of arts and culture, a free market will

6 May 2014

This article from the May 2014 edition of the IPA Review is by Professor of Economics at RMIT and Adjunct Fellow with the IPA, Jason Potts. Back in 1988, New Zealand economist Ronnie Horesh was thinking hard about how to fix social policy. Ronnie believed that the most effective catalyst for the generation of wealth was self-interest, and that this could be

24 August 2013

This article from the Winter 2013 edition of the IPA Review is written by Adjunct Fellow at the IPA and Associate Professor in Economics at RMIT University, Jason Potts. Randy Holcombe is a professor of public finance and public policy at Florida State University and a scholar in the style of the James Buchanan school of Public Choice economics. Holcombe was

6 December 2012

This article from the December 2012 edition of the IPA Review is by IPA Adjunct Fellow, Jason Potts and Director of Climate Change Policy and the Intellectual Property and Free Trade Unit at the IPA, Tim Wilson. A: Yes, it is– Jason Potts Like most justifications of state intervention, intellectual property purports to solve a problem of market failure. New ideas