Australian Journal of Management

The Report of the Crawford Study Group on Structural Adjustment (March 1979) is reviewed with particular emphasis on the Study Group's concept of an ‘outward looking, export oriented’ manufacturing sector. Reduced protection coupled with facilitative assistance through export subsidies and positive adjustment measures constituted the key recommendations to achieve restructuring. Gradualism in reform, potential exemptions from reform, and the peculiar properties of the particular export subsidy all detract from the recommendations in varying degrees. Nevertheless the Study Group Report is a worthwhile contribution to the debate on structural change in Australia.

Strikes have been examined from a variety of theoretical perspectives and at different levels of analysis. But for various reasons associated with theoretical developments in industrial relations and sociology, inter-industry strike studies have been neglected. This article discusses these issues and argues for a new approach to strike analysis. It is one which concentrates on identifying strike patterns in different industries and emphasises the interplay between workplace characteristics and the institutional context. A theoretical framework is developed along these lines and then used to interpret the strike patterns characteristic of Broken Hill metal mining, New South Wales coal mining, the Queensland meat slaughtering and New South Wales furniture industries.

In the spirit of Fisher and Lorie (1968), the authors constructed a data base comprising monthly rates of return on 1029 separately-listed Sydney mining equities over the period January 1958 to February 1979. The data base should stimulate further research. The first use of the data is a study by the authors of historical risks and returns from equity investments in Australian mining. The value-weighted average return over the period was found to be 11.9% per year, continuously-compounded. Mining equities were considerably riskier (considered by themselves) than industrial equities and a surprisingly large amount of their risk did not appear to be diversifiable. There was little correlation between size (measured by market capitalization) and subsequent rate of return, though size and standard deviation of rate of return were significantly negatively correlated. The seemingly unfavourable risk/return comparison for mining is anomalous and requires further investigation.

This paper is an attempt to determine the extent to which Australian tertiary sector organisations stand to gain from improved weather forecasts. An upper limit to this amount must be the sum of the maximum savings afforded by weather forecasts sufficiently accurate (“almost” perfect) to result in weather-error-free decisions for each organisation. The paper presents the results of a survey of tertiary sector organisations undertaken to determine the amount of these potential savings. The paper discusses operational improvements to increase the usefulneww of forecasts, and also discusses the structure of the weather forecasting industry in general.

Commentators, including the author, have argued that many of the reasons for the proliferation and survival of small unions in Australia can be traced to the law. In 1977, the author was called upon to consider not-dissimilar arguments in the context of a very different industrial relations system, namely, Hong Kong. Her findings indicated a number of reasons underlying the preference for small, particularistic unions - notwithstanding ample opportunity within the legal provisions for the union movement to achieve rationalisation if it chose to do so. The law was found to be permissive toward proliferation, but only in respect of federation could it be said to act as a possible constraint on rationalisation.

This study of the market for Commonwealth government securities in Australia pays particular attention to the influence of interest rate expectations on demand. Attempts to estimate expectations with current and past information, including the use of a Box-Jenkins time series model are unsuccessful. An assumption that interest rate expectations are based on perfect foresight proves valuable in explaining the demand for government securities. The picture of the market which emerges is one of a private sector which acts on new information more quickly than it is incorporated in the official yield curve.

Practical Personnel and Industrial Relations Management in Australia