The Australian Financial Complaints Authority (AFCA) is the ombudsman for the banking sector, financed by the industry itself. It has a huge number of staff - equivalent to 755 full-time employees as ...of October 2020. Handling the complaints from customers of banks and other financial institutions is evidently a massive task. Indeed, it is telling for the so-called virtues of 'the free market' that this sector's operations generate so much dissatisfaction to require an ombudsman of this scale. A major public interest is at stake, requiring periodic review by the Federal Treasury. The review was tabled in Parliament on 24 November 2021, attracting little media interest other than a brief article in 'The Australian' on 25 November that reported AFCA’s Chief Ombudsman and the Financial Services Minister as claiming it as a positive report card. Probably the best thing that can be said of the Review is that its content implicitly exposes some of AFCA’s failures, while hiding others. The statistics on the compensation awarded to complainants, for example, show a total of $447 million, including $202 million for remediation on ‘systemic issues’ in 2019-20. Much of this presumably relates to relatively straightforward retail customers of banking, financial advisory, superannuation and insurance service providers. As someone who has responded to requests for help from many bank victims over the years (especially small businesses, amateur property investors or simple home mortgagors), I can attest to the very different experience they had with AFCA and its predecessor, the Financial Ombudsman Service (FOS).
This research shows that linguistic differences can influence the diffusion of technology and income between countries. I use a measure of language similarity known as the normalised Levenshtein ...distance to show that lexical distances closely track bilateral differences in the adoption intensities of key production technologies. This relationship holds for technologies in the transportation, information technology, steel, telecommunications and health sectors. Linguistic differences also result in larger bilateral gaps in per capita income. These results hold among higher but not low‐income nations, likely because language affects technology transfer only once a threshold level of development is surpassed.
Mainstream economists' conception of an activist role for government is oriented predominantly at the 'macroeconomic' level. If the profession conceives of a role for government in the ...'microeconomic' sphere, it is generally a negative role, oriented towards destroying the impediments to the free operation of 'the market' - hence 'microeconomic reform'. The macro-micro divide is essentially a policy-market divide. The bias towards the primacy and capacity of macroeconomic policy remains in the current environment. This bias is inconsiderate of three intrinsic weaknesses.
Fish immunization has been carried out for over 50 years and is generally accepted as an effective method for preventing a wide range of bacterial and viral diseases. Vaccination efforts contribute ...to environmental, social, and economic sustainability in global aquaculture. Most licensed fish vaccines have traditionally been inactivated microorganisms that were formulated with adjuvants and delivered through immersion or injection routes. Live vaccines are more efficacious, as they mimic natural pathogen infection and generate a strong antibody response, thus having a greater potential to be administered via oral or immersion routes. Modern vaccine technology has targeted specific pathogen components, and vaccines developed using such approaches may include subunit, or recombinant, DNA/RNA particle vaccines. These advanced technologies have been developed globally and appear to induce greater levels of immunity than traditional fish vaccines. Advanced technologies have shown great promise for the future of aquaculture vaccines and will provide health benefits and enhanced economic potential for producers. This review describes the use of conventional aquaculture vaccines and provides an overview of current molecular approaches and strategies that are promising for new aquaculture vaccine development.
The philosophy of liberalism has been the subject of a vast but frustrating literature. Too much is oriented to the philosophy of liberalism, not enough to liberalism as it played out historically in ...politics and policy.
From the moment governments began making money from levying duty on imported goods, a smuggling trade developed to avoid paying such taxes. Whilst the popular image of historic smuggling remains a ...romantic one, this book makes clear that the illicit trade could be a large-scale and systematic business that relied on the connivance of well-connected merchants. Taking the port of Bristol as a case study, the book provides the most sophisticated historical study ever undertaken of the smugglers' trade, in England or abroad. Following on from the author's prize-winning article in Economic History Review, the volume employs the business accounts of sixteenth-century merchants to reconstruct their illicit operations. It presents a detailed analysis of the merchants' illegal businesses, assessing how individual merchants, and Bristol's commercial class, were able to protect their contraband trade. More fundamentally, it examines how and why the illicit trade developed, why the Crown was unable to suppress it, and the role smuggling played within Bristol's wider economy. Through an investigation of these matters the study explores a world that has long attracted popular interest, but which has always been assumed to be immune to serious historical investigation. The book offers a pioneering study, demonstrating that a detailed examination of a particular time and place, based on a close and integrated reading of both official and private records, can make it possible for historians to investigate illicit economies to a greater degree than has previously been believed possible.
The philosophy of liberalism has been the subject of a vast but frustrating literature. Too much is oriented to the philosophy of liberalism, not enough to liberalism as it played out historically in ...politics and policy. Liberalism is a protean philosophy, making a coherent articulation impossible. Moreover, the label has been much abused. Some literature equates liberalism purely with the philosophy of the freedom of the individual and embodying the moral imperative of such (cf. Ruggiero 1959). Some authors even grant to liberalism the source of all human progress in the last several hundred years (cited in Jones 1994).
On the contrary. Democracy is intrinsically universalist in conception. In contrast, liberalism (in practice and, hence, in essence) is selective in its intended beneficiaries. This article explores the contradictions inherent in liberalism and its neglected dark side, with particular reference to its character and evolution in Great Britain.
On 28 February 2020 the WHO issued a report on China's efforts to control the Coronavirus outbreak, dictating a comprehensive governmentled response to the threat. On 29 February, the French Prime ...Minister Edouard Philippe chose to divert priorities from a Ministerial Council dedicated to COVID-19 by utilising article 49-3 of the Constitution to bypass Parliament and authorise a brutal retirement 'reform' package, against which vast sections of the country had struck and demonstrated.
A web-based survey was conducted of ergonomics practitioners holding certifications in the U.S., Canada, Great Britain, Australia, and New Zealand. The survey follows 12 years after an earlier ...initial survey reported by Dempsey et al. (2005). Approximately 1221 eligible participants were invited by e-mail to participate, and 405 surveys were included in the final analysis. The survey queried use of basic instruments relevant to ergonomic practice as well as more specific analytical tools such as observational techniques for assessing postural demands of work and instrumentation for direct measurement of such demands. Some ergonomic assessment methods appear to have increased in their overall use by U.S. ergonomists compared to 2005 data. This was observed for: RULA, REBA, Psychophysical Upper Extremity Data, Strain Index, and ACGIH TLV for Hand Activity Level. There is minimal evidence of increased overall use of direct measurement approaches in the U.S. There appear to be geographic differences between countries/continents in terms of use of various methods. The use of mobile device/smart phone “apps” by ergonomists was queried and these technologies presently appear to be in early adoption phase with 24–28% of practitioners reporting use of an app in their ergonomics practice.
On 28 February 2020 the WHO issued a report on China's efforts to control the Coronavirus outbreak, dictating a comprehensive governmentled response to the threat. On 29 February, the French Prime ...Minister Edouard Philippe chose to divert priorities from a Ministerial Council dedicated to COVID-19 by utilising article 49-3 of the Constitution to bypass Parliament and authorise a brutal retirement 'reform' package, against which vast sections of the country had struck and demonstrated.
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