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Using a logistic model, this paper empirically investigated farmers' perception of climate change and its determinants based on a field survey of 1 350 rural households across five major grain producing provinces in China. The results show: i) There is an apparent difference in perception levels for long-term temperature and precipitation changes. Specifically, 57.4% of farmers perceived the long-term temperature change correctly, but only 29.7% of farmers perceived the long-term precipitation change correctly; ii) The factors influencing the farmers' perceptions are almost completely different between precipitation and temperature, the former are mostly agriculture related, while latter are mostly non-agriculture related, except for farm size; and iii) Farmers are not expected to pay more attention to long-term precipitation changes over the crop growing seasons, because less than 30% of farmers can correctly perceive long-term precipitation change. Therefore, to improve the accuracy of farmers' perceptions of climate change, the government is recommended to: i) enhance education and training programs; ii) speed up land transfer and expand household land farm size; iii) develop farmer cooperative organizations; iv) invest more in agricultural infrastructure, specifically in major grain producing regions; and v) improve the agricultural environment and increase farming income.

In agriculture based economies like Pakistan, farmers often shift from farming to off-farm activities as part of an apparent livelihood transition strategy, despite the fact that most of the workforce depends upon farming. In this paper, we try to uncover insights into how livelihood assets, such as human capital, natural capital, economic capital, and locational characteristics, affect a household&rsquo, s exit decision from on-farm to off-farm activities as a livelihood transition strategy in rural Pakistan. We analyzed data from 335 farming households from the second largest agricultural producing province in the country, Sindh. Our findings show that more than 19% of households have completely shifted from farming to off-farm activities. Furthermore, we identified that the &lsquo, crop input credit&rsquo, is one of the major constraints to farmers converting their previous input-driven small loans into larger loans, where large markups may be imposed if they fail to pay when the harvest is made. The empirical findings from Binary Logistic Regression provide strong evidence for family labor characteristics, particularly for working-age males, working-age females, and working-age children. Surprisingly, the cultivated land size significantly and positively influences farm exit rather than a continuation of farming. Off-farm employment, exogenous shocks, and urbanization also significantly and positively influenced the decision to transition into off-farm work. In contrast, the age of the household head, livestock ownership, and distance to a commercial zone significantly inhibited the decision to exit farming. However, government assistance, including subsidies, strongly encouraged farmers to continue farming. These findings provide new insights into the factors affecting the drivers of both exit and continuation in the farming sector as part of a long-term livelihood transition strategy.

Water availability is a major constraint on grain production in China, therefore, improving irrigation efficiency is particularly important when agriculture faces extreme weather events. This paper first calculates irrigation efficiency with a translog stochastic frontier production function and then investigates what happens when extreme weather events occur via a Tobit model. The estimated results reveal several important features of irrigation practices: i) irrigation efficiency is lower when extreme weather events occur; ii) large variations in irrigation efficiency occur across irrigation facilities; iii) the farm plots exhibit an extreme distribution across efficiency levels; and iv) water-saving techniques, technology adoption, and the maintenance of farmers’ economic resilience are major determinants of irrigation efficiency. Based on these results we propose the following recommendations: i) farmers should balance crop yield and water use; undertake relevant training programs and adopt water-saving techniques; ii) local governments and researchers should help farmers to find the optimal level of irrigation water use based on their own circumstances and provide better water-saving techniques and training programs rather than simply encouraging farmers to invest in irrigation facilities in the most extreme weather years; and iii) the income level of farm households should be increased so as to improve their resilience to natural disasters.

Employing an endogenous switching regression model, we investigate the drivers underlying the adaptations made by farm households and their impacts on crop net incomes for adopters and nonadopters, based on a large panel survey data set across the major grain-producing provinces in China. The results show that: (i) access to public climate information and technical or physical support increases the likelihood that farmers adapt to climate change by undertaking irrigation and/or drainage measures; and (ii) decisions to adapt increased crop yield, but they did not significantly increase crop profit margins. This point appears to have been ignored by previous studies. Based on these new empirical results, the paper suggests that government should continue to provide climate information and various types of supports to improve farmers’ adaptation abilities and help to reduce the levels of factor input by, for example, substituting organic for chemical fertiliser inputs. Such government-led policies should be supported alongside the implementation of domestic agricultural supply-side reform.

At the turn of the twentieth century, New Zealand was one of the wealthiest nations in the world on a per capita basis. We examine the role of innovation in explaining New Zealand’s economic performance. Using a new dataset on patent applications for the period 1880-1895, we consider whether the geographical concentration of innovative activity influenced economic activity. We find relationships between agricultural and pastoral output indices and inventiveness and between different regions and related industries. The results, however, are relatively weak. We conclude that tests of agglomeration effects in New Zealand during this period deserve further attention. (This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.)

Over the past three decades, China has implemented reforms in the agricultural sector in an attempt to increase efficiency and food security. However, China now faces a number of environmental degradation problems, in part, caused by her past agricultural reforms. In this paper we estimate, using a provincial-based panel dataset, a third-order translog cost function for China's grain production sector over the period 1990–2011. Results from the estimation, including estimated elasticities of demand for and substitution of factors, suggest that labor and capital are substitutes. This arises because the increasing cost of labor, induced by urbanization and the growth of the manufacturing sector, has lead to a substitution of machinery for labor in the production of wheat. The results are consistent with current government policies to encourage via subsidies and agricultural mechanization, which we show to be technically, a substitute for labor. We further conclude this will create an additional bonus of reducing the amount of fertilizer that is needed to efficiently and securely produce wheat in China, as the new capital is more efficient at fertilizer distribution.

The performance of the New Zealand (NZ) economy is something of an enigma. Although ranked one (of 144 countries) for four important growth fundamentals' NZ is middle of the pack' when it comes to economic growth, productivity and process innovation. Using four iterations (2005, 2007, 2009 and 2011) of the Business Operations Survey, this research seeks to shed some new light on this conundrum by using a multivariate probit regression (mvprobit) approach applied to pooled samples in excess of 22,000 unit record observations of NZ firms. The results suggest that factors including firm size, high perceived quality, investment/research and development (R&D) capability, major technology change, application of formal IP protection and new export markets are systematically and positively related to innovation; while many external issues, such as those related to geography, market structure, business environment, have little influence. At the firm level, innovations in NZ are highly dependent on the firms' internal ability to develop new technologies and market demand. The (very small) size of firms does matter in NZ, which lacks a major home market' or a major trade block on its doorstep, such that ultimately, government may need to be involved to maintain a viable scale for domestic R&D.

We propose a novel framework to analyse the macroeconomic impact of noncommunicable diseases. We incorporate measures of disease prevalence into a human capital augmented production function, which enables us to determine the economic costs of chronic health conditions in terms of foregone gross domestic product (GDP). Unlike previously adopted frameworks, this approach allows us to account for i) variations in human capital for workers in different age groups, ii) mortality and morbidity effects of non-communicable diseases, and iii) the treatment costs of diseases. We apply our methodology to China, Japan, and South Korea, and estimate the economic burden of chronic conditions in five domains (cardiovascular diseases, cancer, respiratory diseases, diabetes, and mental health conditions). Overall, total losses associated with these non-communicable diseases over the period 2010-2030 are $16 trillion for China (measured in real USD with the base year 2010), $5.7 trillion for Japan, and $1.5 trillion for South Korea. Our results also highlight the limits of cost-effectiveness analysis by identifying some intervention strategies to reduce disease prevalence in China that are cost beneficial and therefore a rational use of resources, though they are not cost-effective as judged by conventional thresholds.

This paper reports new evidence on the existence of both large and small price divergent clusters for China's energy markets, 2000–2009. The largest convergent price clusters suggest that the coal and gasoline markets are well integrated, however, small convergent price clusters suggest that electricity and diesel markets are proving harder to integrate. The paper argues that the traditional approach to price convergence analysis should be applied with caution, especially in a transitional economy such as China where questions to be asked should relate to the ‘degree of market-orientation’ and not simply whether it is a market-based economy or not.

The paper considers the role and determinants of capital formation in Chinese agriculture and, in particular, the effects of capital formation on agricultural total factor productivity (TFP) growth. The results show that capital investment in agriculture by both government and farmers has risen significantly in the past two and a half decades, particularly in recent years. As China remains in the early stages of agricultural policy transition, its political economy would suggest that there will likely be more public investment in, and more subsidies to, agriculture in the coming years. Increased public investment in agriculture appears to have also induced increased farmers' capital formation in agriculture. Credit policy, the overall growth of farmer's income, rural wages, and comparative advantage of commodities are important factors that may facilitate farmers' investment in agriculture. The results also show that the successful growth of China's agriculture has been associated with its high TFP growth. Both public and private agricultural capital formations have played an important role in raising China's agricultural productivity. The TFP decomposition analyses show that technological change is a primary driver of the TFP growth in China's agriculture.

Following reforms to the market, China’s hog industry has developed rapidly, however, with social and economic transitions, China’s hog industry is facing challenges which might restrict long-term growth in production. This paper analyzes the changes in regional scale, organization, input factors, and technological progress for China’s hog production over the last few decades. The paper seeks to reveal the sources of hog production growth and provide some suggestions for future development of the hog industry. To achieve these aims, the paper uses stochastic frontier production functions and the Malmquist index to measure total factor productivity (TFP) in the hog industry and decompose TFP into technical efficiency; technological progress; scale efficiency; and allocative efficiency using data for 25 provinces from 1980 to 2008. The results show firstly that; the TFP of hog production increased by 64.3% from 1980 to 2008, and allocative efficiency and scale efficiency improvements played a key role in this TFP growth. In contrast, technical efficiency and technical progress have changed little over this period. Secondly, TFP’s contribution to output was 39.7%, it being less than that of factor inputs to output. Thirdly, the results suggest that the growth of China’s pork production depends mostly on the increase in the quantity of factor inputs, especially feed. As a consequence, the key to ensuring long-term and stable development of China’s hog production would seem to involve focusing on enhancing total factor productivity and changing the pattern of production growth.

Employing the new regression tests for Convergence, Club Convergence and Clustering proposed by Phillips and Sul (2007), this paper models and analyses the behaviour of China's energy sectors. Energy market ‘convergence clusters’ are identified using new price data, and their regional spatial distributions are mapped for four major fuel types: coal, gasoline, diesel and electricity. The findings are as follows: i) as yet, there are no fully integrated national energy markets in China, as more than one convergence cluster is identified for all four fuels; ii) some regional energy markets can be regarded as ‘quite mature,’ as evidenced by the existence of some highly concentrated convergence clusters connected geographically; iii) some regional markets remain in a ‘state of transition,’ as witnessed by convergence clusters that are scattered geographically and that are growing in membership; iv) it seems that there is more regional-based integration for coal and electricity than for gasoline and diesel, as more convergent clusters were identified for coal and electricity than for gasoline and diesel; and v) overall, China still appears to be in the process of energy market integration, as demonstrated by the number and evolution of convergence clusters over time.

The paper investigates energy price co-movement over the period 01/1999–12/2005 for China as a whole, and over sub-periods and for seven regions, using panel unit root and panel cointegration tests developed by Pedroni (1999, 2004). The results suggest that not all energy sources are spatially homogenous in prices and the processes of energy price cointegration are different over sub-periods; over groups of fuels; and over regions. Coal and electricity prices have co-moved since 2003 while gasoline and diesel prices have co-moved since 1997. The results show that there are clearly variations in the emergence of energy price co-movement over regions, implying that regional fuel markets have emerged in China. Important lessons that can be learnt from the results are that an energy market has, to some extent, already emerged in China and, as a result, energy prices are substantially less distorted than before. If correct, these findings have significant global implications both in terms of future emission reductions, emission trading and trade negotiations where China should be treated as a ‘market driven economy’.

We explore the role of knowledge accumulation in the economic development of a natural resource-rich country. New estimates of commodity output and patenting are used to show New Zealand's exceptionally high incomes before 1939 rested on a knowledge-led utilization of her economic landscape. By investigating the cointegrating and causal relationships among the output of 25 industries we show that a small number of leading industries formed development blocks. In turn most leading industries were driven by knowledge growth as reflected in patent statistics. Knowledge accumulation helped to transform the farming landscape and integrate farm and factory within a New Zealand system of mass production.

This paper surveys China's renewable energy economy, focusing particularly on renewable energy laws and programs, the lessons that can be learnt from the current literature, and the implications of that literature. Gaps in the literature on China's renewable energy economy include the need for more comprehensive econometric studies. The literature may also benefit from more collaboration between renewable energy economists and agricultural economists.

China's demand for energy has grown to fuel its rapidly expanding industrial, commercial and consumer sectors. At the same time, China has become the second largest consumer of petroleum products having surpassed Japan for the first time in 2003. The environmental consequences of a continuation of these trends will have global implications. Government policies and consumers have become more environmentally aware, but the ability of governments to formulate policies has been hindered by the lack of data on inter-factor and inter-fuel substitution possibilities. In this paper Allen partial elasticities of factor and energy substitution, and price elasticities of energy demand are calculated for China's industrial economy using a two-stage translog cost function approach for the period 1995-2004. The results suggest that energy is substitutable with both capital and labor. Coal is significantly substitutable with electricity and slightly complementary with oil, while oil and electricity are slightly substitutable. China's energy intensity is increasing during the study period and the major driver appears to be due to the increased use of energy-intensive technology.

This chapter is organized as follows. Firstly, we consider the historical origins of China’s current energy situation. This is followed by an investigation and analysis of China’s energy resources, including renewable energy. In the third section we consider the energy industry regulations. Section 3.4 focuses on capacity building in the energy sector. Sections 3.5 and 3.6 describe energy transportation (focusing on coal) and energy price information. Section 3.7 discusses China’s energy efficiency in particular, energy intensity over time and across regions. This is followed by a discussion of energy supply, demand and trade in Sect. 3.8. Section 3.9 reviews renewable energy laws, programs and policy, and Sect. 3.10 discusses the potential factors driving both demand and supply.

With its rapid economic growth, China's primary energy consumption has exceeded domestic energy production since 1994, leading to a substantial expansion in energy imports, particularly of oil. China's energy demand has an increasingly significant impact on global energy markets. In this paper Allen partial elasticities of factor and energy substitution, and price elasticities of energy demand, are calculated for China using a two-stage translog cost function approach. The results suggest that energy is substitutable with both capital and labor. Coal is significantly substitutable with electricity and complementary with diesel while gasoline and electricity are substitutable with diesel. China's energy intensity is increasing during the study period (1995–2004) and the major driver appears to be due to the increased use of energyintensive technology.

New Zealand shares a wealth of common interests and experiences with Australia. This has tempted some to assume that these economies form an ‘Economic Club’, in which one would expect to identify common aggregate trends and growth experiences. In this paper we present results that test, and generally reject, convergence in labour productivity across Australia and New Zealand, using both aggregate and disaggregate, industry‐level data. We find that only two industries satisfy our definition of Conditional Convergence (Agriculture, Forestry and Fishing and Cultural and Recreational Services), and that the Mining and Wholesale Trade industries have particularly important roles to play in explaining the measured divergence. Cointegration‐based tests reveal more stochastic trends governing Australian productivity than in New Zealand. The evidence suggests, therefore, that the underlying growth processes of the two economies are fundamentally different, thereby questioning the relevance of aggregate co...

Since initiating reforms in 1978 China has experienced an unprecedented rate of economic growth and development to become the second largest economy in the world after the United States. Yet there is so much that we do not know about the internal workings and operations of the Chinese economy, in part, because the available English-language literature is but a fraction of the scholarly work on China. English-speaking scholars, business people, analysts and policy makers are typically excluded from Chinese-language scholarship, analysis and commentary, or are often limited to ‘executive summary-type’ articles from ‘business-literature’ outlets. We hope to fill at least part of the gap in the story of China, past, present and future with nine up-to-date surveys on some of the critical issues facing China, which have been written by leaders in the relevant fields of scholarship.

This paper analyses results from an investigation into the determinants of biotechnology innovation in New Zealand using a comprehensive new data set. The theoretical framework is based on a synthesis of hypotheses drawn from four strands of the innovation literature and the empirical work utilises Poisson regression methods. The data provide strong support for the idea that smaller enterprises (whether measured by number of biotech graduates or by biotech expenditure) tend to have a higher innovation rate and is in line with other studies reported in the literature. However, these initial results require further exploration.

The responses in New Zealand to the opportunities of refrigeration transformed farming in the Dominion during the half-century from 1890. Closer settlement and the extension of the cultivated area combined with more intensive farming methods to increase land productivity and real gross domestic product capita to the extent that living standards in New Zealand measured by the Human Development Index ranked first in the world by 1913. In contrast, real wages in the Dominion stagnated. The refrigeration-related trade boom had powerful income distribution effects that increased sharply the land rental–wage ratio during the years to 1920. Widely diffuse land ownership in New Zealand tempered the rise in income inequality, to set the Dominion apart from other land-abundant economies of the periphery.

A number of industrialized and developing countries agreed to the terms of the Kyoto protocol to conserve energy and reduce emissions. The close relationship between energy consumption and real GDP growth suggests that energy conservation policies are likely to affect real GDP growth. In this paper, the possible impact of energy conservation policies on the New Zealand economy is examined and compared with Australia and several Asian economies. Causality between energy consumption and GDP in New Zealand is investigated as is the causal relationship between GDP and various disaggregate energy data (coal, natural gas, electricity and oil). Based on the energy data used, it appears that energy conservation policies may not have significant impacts on real GDP growth in industrialized countries such as New Zealand and Australia compared to some Asian economies.

This article exploits the time-series properties of 26 industries' output data to consider the interrelationships among industries and the sources of growth during early British industrialization. A small number of stochastic common trends drove the permanent components of disaggregate industrial production. These are associated with specific industrial groupings, including one comprising cotton, minerals, and metals and another the food processing industries. The results shed light on the breadth of Industrial Revolution technological progress and highlight the roles of the cotton and iron goods industries in leading industrial growth.

This paper considers the persistence of British and American economic and industrial leadership, using the time series properties of productivity series to assess the existence, pace, and timing of convergence. We report evidence in favor of segmented convergence processes for GDP per capita and real wages. In contrast, the industrial output per worker gap between the two economies appears nonstationary, and divergent during the century after 1870. The evolution of distinct industrial systems precludes an important role for industrial technology transfer in GDP per capita convergence. Cointegration-based causality tests and calibration methods are used to argue that the levels of and returns from higher education underpin the disparities in British and American economic and industrial performance during the 20th century.

This discussion paper resulted in a publication in 'Selected Papers of the MSSANZ 19th Biennial Conference on Modelling and Simulation Mathematics and Computers in Simulation', 2013, pp. viii. The papers in this special issue of Mathematics and Computers in Simulation cover the following topics: improving judgmental adjustment of model-based forecasts, whether forecast updates are progressive, on a constrained mixture vector autoregressive model, whether all estimators are born equal: the empirical properties of some estimators of long memory, characterising trader manipulation in a limit-order driven market, measuring bias in a term-structure model of commodity prices through the comparison of simultaneous and sequential estimation, modelling tail credit risk using transition matrices, evaluation of the DPC-based inclusive payment system in Japan for cataract operations by a new model, the matching of lead underwriters and issuing firms in the Japanese corporate bond market, stochastic life table forecasting: a time-simultaneous fan chart application, adaptive survey designs for sampling rare and clustered populations, income distribution inequality, globalization, and innovation: a general equilibrium simulation, whether exchange rates affect consumer prices: a comparative analysis for Australia, China and India, the impacts of exchange rates on Australia's domestic and outbound travel markets, clean development mechanism in China: regional distribution and prospects, design and implementation of a Web-based groundwater data management system, the impact of serial correlation on testing for structural change in binary choice model: Monte Carlo evidence, and coercive journal self citations, impact factor, journal influence and article influence.

Many areas of economics involve the formulation of models and the testing of certain hypotheses. Estimation and hypothesis testing can now be routinely under taken using many estimation packages, for example, M I C R O F I T 3.0 (Pesaran and Pesaran, [1]), and PC-GIVE (Hendry, [2]). Many new estimation techniques, for example Johansen [3] maximum likelihood methods, can be "routinely" used by relatively inexperienced users. New statistical tests are rapidly incorporated into existing estimation packages. However, how 'best ' to 'discover' an adequate model with known, powerful, statistical properties, remains to many, if not the majority of economists, an act of "alchemy" and not science to paraphrase Hendry [4,5] (see also McAleer, Pagan and Volker, [6] and Lovell [7]). Demystification of the expert's expertise in an operational, constructive and open manner is the motivation behind attempts to incorporate methods from the discipline of artificial intelligence, particularly expert systems, into economics. This paper will investigate how an expert systems approach might be applied to the problem of econometric model formulation. In Section 2, we will discuss current "best-pract ice 'econometrics to give an outline of the candidate econometric methods available. Section 3 will outline the power of expert systems applications. Section 4 describes via a schematic diagram, how an expert system may be constructed for use in applied economics and Section 5 concludes.

ed from and unconstrained by social and cultural institutions. 3 Note the rise of ‘open sourcing’ knowledge sharing among computer workers and software programmers that belies the corporate boundaries of organizational knowledge and intellectual property. 4 Numerous examples of these include deliberate mediocre performance, elaborate practical joking, and playing fantasy games on the internet. See, e.g., Casey (2002), Jermier et al. (1994), Kunda (1992) for further discussion.

The paper is concerned with analysing what makes a great journal great in economics, based on quantifiable measures. Alternative Research Assessment Measures (RAM) are discussed, with an emphasis on the Thomson Reuters ISI Web of Science database (hereafter ISI). The various ISI RAM that are calculated annually or updated daily are defined and analysed, including the classic 2-year impact factor (2YIF), 5-year impact factor (5YIF), Immediacy (or zero-year impact factor (0YIF)), Eigenfactor score, Article Influence, C3PO (Citation Performance Per Paper Online), h-index, Zinfluence, PI-BETA (Papers Ignored - By Even The Authors), and two new RAM measure, the Self-citation Threshold Approval Rating (STAR) score and the Impact Factor Inflation (IFI) score. The ISI RAM data are analysed for the most highly cited journals in the ISI categories of Economics, Management, Business, and Business - Finance. The journals are chosen on the basis of 2YIF (including self citations by both author and journal). The application to these four ISI categories could be used as a template for other ISI categories in both the Social Sciences and the Sciences, and as a benchmark for newer journals in a range of ISI disciplines. In addition to evaluating high quality research in the most highly cited Economics journals, the paper also compares the most highly cited journals in Management, Business, and Business - Finance, alternative RAM, highlights the similarities and differences in alternative RAM criteria, finds that several ISI RAM capture similar performance characteristics for the most highly cited Economics, Management, Business and Business - Finance journals, determines that the Immediacy and PI-BETA scores are not highly correlated with the other ISI RAM, and hence conveys additional information regarding ISI RAM criteria. Harmonic mean rankings of the 12 RAM criteria for the most highly cited journals in the four categories are also presented. It was shown that emphasizing THE impact factor, specifically the 2-year impact factor, of a journal to the exclusion of other useful and illuminating RAM criteria, can lead to a distorted evaluation of journal performance and influence on the profession.

Many are interested in China’s energy situation, however, numerous energy related issues in China still remain unanswered. For example, what are the potential forces driving energy demand and supply? Previous reviews focused only on fossil fuel based energy and ignored other important elements including renewable and ‘clean’ energy sources. The work presented here is intended to fill this gap by bringing the research on fossil-based and renewable energy economic studies together and identifying the potential drivers behind both energy demand and supply to provide a complete picture of China’s energy situation in the new millennium. This will be of interest to anyone concerned with the development of China’s economy in general, and in particular with its energy economy.

This paper investigates energy market integration in China by employing univariate, and panel-based unit root tests and Granger causality tests applied to a new energy price data set. We identify price series that converge either to absolute or relative price parity. In addition we estimate the rates (speed) at which relative prices converge to their long-run values, and the direction of causality. The results show that gasoline and diesel markets are very well integrated as a whole; and that once some geographically isolated regions are excluded, we can regard the coal market as integrated; however, the electricity market is not well integrated. The estimated intercept terms are all very small and close to zero, such that most of the relative price series can be regarded as convergent to absolute price parity. The convergence rates vary little and are relatively short when compared internationally. A rich set of causal relationships are established many showing bi-directional causality between regional centres.

With its rapid economic growth, China's primary energy consumption has exceeded domestic energy production since 1994, leading to a substantial expansion in energy imports, particularly of oil. China's energy demand has an increasingly significant impact on global energy markets. In this paper Allen partial elasticities of factor and energy substitution, and price elasticities of energy demand, are calculated for China using a two-stage translog cost function approach. The results suggest that energy is substitutable with both capital and labour. Coal is significantly substitutable with electricity and complementary with diesel while gasoline and electricity are substitutable with diesel. China's energy intensity is increasing during the study period (1995-2004) and the major driver appears to be due to the increased use of energy intensive technology.

Models of energy demand in New Zealand have typically been based upon either a partial general equilibrium approach or constructed from spreadsheet models. The results created by such methods predict that electricity is forecast to be the fastest growing energy demanded by households and the industrial sector for the next two decades. Furthermore, aggregate electricity demand is forecast to grow at a constant rate for the next two decades. In this paper we attempt to model and forecast electricity demand using a number of recent econometric approaches including Engle-Granger's Error Correction Model, Phillip and Hansen's (1990) Fully Modified Least Squares, and the AutoRegressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) approach of Pesaran et al. (1996, 1998). We identify the model with the smallest forecasting error using a series of forecasting measures and conclude that the new ARDL approach of Pesaran et al., has better forecasting performance than the other approaches considered.