Recent publications in IPA Review article
False dawn: the Arab Spring
In a sense, the so-called Arab Spring can be said to have begun on 26 December 2010 in the Tunisian hinterland township of Sidi Bouzid, where a 26-year-old impoverished vegetable seller and father of eight, Mohamed Bouazizi, immolated himself in...
The Chinese capitalist miracle
The Chinese economic miracle is the latest and most comprehensive success story since the end of World War II. Veteran economists Ronald Coase and Ning Wang explain how in the space of three decades one of the world's poorest countries became the...
Tax reform = growth
Australia's tax system has its problems. Too complicated, too many special allowances and specific taxes, and too much money drained out of the pockets of working Australians. But things could be worse. Australia could have the British tax system,...
17 radical savings
If Tony Abbott is to win office at the next federal election in 2013 he has a massive savings task ahead of him. Despite Wayne Swan's insistence that a ‘wafer-thin' surplus will be achieved in the 2013-2014 budget, Australia will still be in...
25 more ideas for Tony Abbott
Following on from our 75 ideas in the last edition, John Roskam, James Paterson and Chris Berg offer 25 more ideas to reshape Australia. 76 Have State Premiers appoint High Court justices 77 Allow ministers to be appointed...
A roadmap to peace in the war on drugs
The war on drugs has been raging for decades. Tens of millions of lives have been lost or ruined. Because both the effect of the drugs and the effect of criminalisation have contributed to the toll, both prohibitionists and those for...
Power and the years of LBJ
There is almost a cult amongst readers of political history and biography: those who count down the years until the release of the next volume of Robert Caro's totemic biography of Lyndon Johnson. Commencing with The Path to Power in 1982,...
The essence of successful nations
Tolstoy famously wrote that while happy families are all alike, unhappy families are uniquely unhappy in their own way. In their latest book, MIT economist Daron Acemoglu and Harvard political scientist James Robinson have found the Russian...
Why capitalism is awesome
Each year the glossy business magazine FastCompany releases a list of what it considers to be the ‘World's 50 most innovative companies'. This list is populated much as you would expect. In 2012, the leader is Apple, followed by Facebook,...
The end of money as we know it
The Western world's post global financial crisis stagnation has shaken faith in the idea that central banking and monetary policy activism can resuscitate sick economies back to life. This has been reinforced by the fact that controversial...