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Public policy is frequently characterised as a sub-discipline of political science which is practically oriented and concerned with what government does and does not do. Further, policy analysis can also be characterised as concerned with either the analysis 'of policy' or 'for policy'. This clearly has implications for the design and delivery of public policy courses. More broadly, higher education in Australia, like elsewhere, faces calls to ensure that students graduate with a range of skills and aptitudes that make them 'job ready' and able to engage with 'real world problems'. One of the ways in which this can be pursued is through industry engagement. However, limited research has been undertaken regarding what this might entail or how it can be pursued. Accordingly, in this paper we explore these issues by: (a) situating engagement within the field of public policy; (b) reviewing how the changing context of higher education, with a particular focus on the drivers and rationale for greater engagement with industry, intersects with the teaching of public policy; and (c) providing a framework which helps to clarify the different modes, potential and risks associated with industry engagement.

Nine years of experience teaching economics in the Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan provides knowledge on the nuances and challenges of teaching economics across cultures. Particular categories and difficulties are presented with some examples of how to address them. Conclusions and findings are used to form general guiding principles for teaching economics in the increasingly diverse US classroom. The principles offered in the paper are valuable to English speakers providing economic teaching and training in post-Soviet nations and, more broadly, to anyone teaching economics across cultures. Finally, suggestions based these principles are offered to encourage all professors of economics to carefully consider language, illustrations, diversity of views regarding economics and the multi-cultural nature of university classrooms to better relate to students and be more effective teachers.

This article documents the experiences of three early career academics trying to establish a network of early career academics (ECAs) in a middle-ranked university in Australia. The changing context of academia means that ECAs face considerable challenges in understanding and negotiating effective career paths. Some of the issues encountered include insecure employment arrangements; unclear and shifting expectations; heavy workloads and competing demands; and conflicting experiences around the collegiate culture of academia. As research and teaching institutions, universities must ensure the ongoing development of new academics. While there is a growing interest in exploring the issues confronted by new academics, much remains to be done to better understand, and improve, the pathways of academic development. To this end we reflect on our efforts to establish an ECA network that aimed to enhance professional development, facilitate an improved research culture and establish an informal peer support network. We did so through establishing an online presence for sharing information, hosting a series of professional development seminars and hosting a 2.5 day writing retreat. Our experiences suggest that, while efforts to enhance the capacity of ECAs are worthwhile, the very same pressures that our network was attempting to address were simultaneously creating barriers to ECA involvement in the network and its activities.

Departments of agricultural economics use a variety of methods to evaluate teaching effectiveness. Past studies have shown that departments of agricultural economics rely heavily on student evaluations of teaching for both evaluating teaching and making promotion, tenure, and salary decisions. We surveyed heads/chairs of agricultural economics departments to determine: 1) how they evaluate teaching; 2) what factors affect promotion, tenure, and salary decisions related to teaching appointment; and 3) attitudes regarding publishing and other creative activity related to teaching. Student evaluation of teaching remains, on average, the most important factor in evaluating teaching. The use and form of the evaluation instruments are similar across all departments, but there is a wide range of the importance placed on the results. Survey results provide some evidence that student evaluations of teaching, while imperfect, are likely to persist as the major method of evaluating teaching in departments of agricultural economics. Peer evaluation of teaching is used less frequently and is mostly used to prepare for promotion and tenure decisions. Publishing peer-reviewed teaching case studies is viewed as being less valuable for professional development than traditional research publishing. Very little weight, in terms of impact on promotion, tenure, and salary decisions, is given to creating open-access teaching materials. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Basis prediction errors for live cattle in the five major Mandatory Livestock Price Reporting areas are analyzed to determine how shifts in the live cattle market fundamentals and contemporaneous market conditions, including price momentum, impact ability to hedge. Results reveal that thinness of the negotiated cash market, weight of cattle marketed, and contemporaneous factors statistically impact basis prediction errors. Impacts vary across region. Volatility in cost of gain and delivery costs have greater effects on basis prediction error than do market trends. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We designed and implemented a so-called Wisdom of the Crowd experiment to demonstrate how information in markets set market prices. Wisdom of the Crowd concepts suggest that random, uncorrelated answers to a simple problem or question given by a group of people will often converge on the correct answer, even though few (of none) of those answering have special knowledge regarding the question. This is similar to the way markets synthesize bids and offers from participants to settle on a price. Students in two courses, production economics and futures trading, were asked to guess the number of jelly beans in a jar. The statistical summary of all guesses was presented to each course in a follow-up lecture on the role of prices and markets in the economy. Results deviated from what we expected in that the average guess of each course was far below the actual number of jelly beans in the jar. We hypothesized this was a result of how the experiment was implemented and informally confirmed this hypothesis with a post hoc experiment. The flexibility of the experiment allowed us to use the bias present in the guesses as a part of the lecture on prices and markets. We pointed out that if all market participants are affected by external information, prices can be artificially different from underlying asset values. Post-experiment surveys indicated that 80% of students saw a clear linkage between the experiment and how markets set prices. Seventy five percent of students indicated that the experiment gave them a better understanding of prices and markets and 93% stated the experiment would be beneficial for future students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses community hubs (CH) — multi-purpose institutions that host social, educational and health services, while building social connectedness and community capacity. Major events such as climate change, wildfires and the COVID-19 pandemic are placing new demands on CHs to be emergency refuges, information centres, community kitchens and more. Such events highlight the critical nature of social infrastructure to both disaster responses and long-term community building and resilience. Such events, though, expose new seams of infrastructural and spatial injustice and place strain on insecure institutional arrangements. Infrastructure policy has typically focussed on large-scale systems and networks in defining and resourcing critical infrastructure. We examine some conceptual and policy challenges in rethinking CHs as anchor institutions for addressing vulnerability, building community resilience, and fostering adaptive responses to enable more socially and environmentally just development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]