Green Power schemes offer electricity generated by recently constructed renewable energy sources to customers for a higher price than ordinary electricity. This study examines the place of Green Power in the electricity supply industry and among policies to counter global warming, the demand and supply characteristics of Green Power, its effectiveness and measures which could increase its sales. Although growing rapidly, Green Power sales are less than 0.5% of total electricity sales in Australia. The wide variation in market penetration between jurisdictions and between countries for Green Power, the discrepancies between stated willingness-to-pay surveys and actual sales and the low awareness of Green Power found by surveys indicate that Green Power sales could be increased by appropriate marketing and government policies. A sample of 250 pooled time series and cross sectional observations was used to estimate a statistically significant elasticity of demand for residential customers for Green Power with respect to price of -0.96. Green Power schemes appear not to be necessarily loss-making activities for retailers. There has been ample generating capacity for Green Power to meet the growing sales to customers to date. The most cost effective means to increase sales was found to be advertising campaigns such as the campaign in Victoria in 2005. It was also found that full tax deductibility of the Green Power premium to residential customers, an exemption of the Green Power premium from the Goods and Services Tax and a tax rebate for Green Power are probably less cost-effective for promoting sales than direct government purchase of Green Power in terms of cost of policy per unit of increased sales. Green Power plays a small but important role as one amongst a number of climate change policies and the potential of this role is yet to be fully realised.

The objective of this study was to develop a political economy framework to explain policies in the Indonesian sugar market. The study investigated government intervention in the sugar market and made an attempt to explain why the policies were in place. The method was traced from the economic theory of regulation and special emphasis was given to the Political Preference Function (PPF) framework. The PPF acted as a governing function or a criterion for government policy decision making. With regard to this framework, the participants in the sugar market were disaggregated into three main players, producers, consumers and government. The study focused on the analysis of political weights embodied in the PPF framework. The PPF framework in the study was applied by developing an empirical model capturing political and economic markets. The policies were evaluated in terms of their efficiency. Following the political economy framework, this study investigated policy efficiency in both political markets (demand side) and economic markets (supply side). This approach was also used 10 show that reform in agricultural policy can only be evaluated with the existence of the PPF. Results of maximising the objective function revealed that the policymakers give the highest weight to the government itself. This implied that there was government self interest in the policy decision making. The analysis showed that the policy objective of supporting producers was achieved at a cost to consumers, while at the same time the government took revenue from the policy. With regard to the optimal policy, the study revealed that producer price and consumer price policy was found to be guile efficient; on average it was 0.9 during the period of the study. This means only 10 per cent of wealth are wasted for every unit of wealth transferred between the groups. In regard to the alternative policy, the study showed that setting producer price and consumer price was more efficient than applying import quota. It confirmed the claim made by Bulog that it treated import as a residual, only to till the gap between domestic production and consumption.