Australasia

In agreement with the Milankovitch orbital forcing hypothesis (Imbrie et al., 1993) it is often assumed that glacial-interglacial climate transitions occurred synchronously in the Northern and Southern hemispheres of the Earth. It is difficult to test this assumption, because of the paucity of long, continuous climate records from the Southern Hemisphere that have not been dated by tuning them to the presumed Northern Hemisphere signals (Lynch-Stieglitz, 2004).

Taupo Volcanic Zone (TVZ), in the North Island, New Zealand, is arguably the most active Quaternary rhyolitic system in the world. Numerous and widespread rhyolitic tephra layers, sourced from the TVZ, form valuable chronostratigraphic markers in onshore and offshore sedimentary sequences. In deep-sea cores from Ocean Drilling Program (ODP) Leg 181 Sites 1125, 1124, 1123 and 1122, located east of New Zealand, ca 100 tephra beds are recognised post-dating the Plio-Pleistocene boundary at 1.81 Ma.

A core from a coral colony of Porites lutea was analysed for stable oxygen isotopic composition*. A 200-year proxy record of sea surface temperatures from the Houtman Abrolhos Islands off west Australia was obtained from coral delta18O. At 29?S, the Houtman Abrolhos are the southernmost major reef complex of the Indian Ocean. They are located on the path of the Leeuwin Current, a southward flow of warm, tropical water, which is coupled to Indonesian throughflow.

Middle Miocene to Holocene pollen assemblages reveal a history of environmental change in northern Australia. Grass pollen appeared, but was rare, in the late Miocene and was consistently present throughout the Pliocene, but did not become abundant until the Pleistocene. Myrtaceae pollen, characteristic of late Cenozoic assemblages in eastern Australia, is poorly represented, and no unequivocal evidence of rain forest was found.

Rangitawa Tephra is an important stratigraphic marker in mid-Pleistocene marine and terrestrial sequences in New Zealand and adjacent ocean basins. Zircon fission track ages (ZFTA) on Rangitawa Tephra from five sites in the southern North Island yield mean site ages in the range 0.34 to 0.40 Ma with a weighted mean of 0.35 + 0.04 Ma (1 sigma).

A detailed pollen record from the Ocean Drilling Program Site 820 core, located on the upper part of the continental slope off the coast of northeast Queensland, was constructed to compare with the existing pollen record from Lynch's Crater on the adjacent Atherton Tableland and allow the production of a regional picture of vegetation and environmental change through the last glacial cycle.

This annual survey, fielded June to December 2004, was conducted in over 50 countries to solicit public opinion on social and political issues. Respondents were asked what they thought was the most important goal for the world as a whole, whether they trusted people from their ethnic group more than people from other ethnic groups, if they heard about various global institutions, and their thoughts of these institutions. They were also asked for their overall opinion of various countries.

The purpose of this study was to re-examine the commonly observed inverse relationship between perceived risk and perceived benefit.

This annual survey, fielded November 2003 to January 2004, was conducted in over 50 countries to solicit public opinion on social and political issues. Respondents were asked about the safety and economic prosperity of their country, the economic prosperity of their own family, whether they expected that the world would be safer for the next generation, and whether the next generation would be more economically prosperous. Views were also sought on international security, environmental security, national security, and economic security.

Fiscal adjustments have been examined from different perspectives in the literature. However, the conceptual approaches to the analysis of budget consolidations vary substantially. Therefore different approaches to the analysis of fiscal adjustments are discussed in a first step. It is shown that the choices regarding the underlying concepts lead to specific research designs and influence the appropriate empirical method. In a second step, the determinants of budget consolidations are examined empirically in four different research designs for 23 industrialized countries in the 1990s.