Decisions are doors that provide people of all ages with opportunities to express who they are and to learn about who they want to become. Sometimes the young people in your life may choose the wrong door and, while that can make for a good learning experience, you probably want to help them make good decisions and avoid the bad ones. You did, after all, decide to open up this book. While we cannot program kids with the answers they need to live healthy and fulfilling lives, we can support kids in learning and using a common-sense approach to understanding and organizing their feelings and thoughts as they make their own decisions.

Creating options is an exciting and fun part of making decisions. It’s what changes “I have to do this” (reluctantly solving a problem) to “I get to do this” (enthusiastically creating an opportunity). People often excuse their decisions by saying, “I didn’t have a choice – it’s just something I had to do.” But that’s rarely true. Decision options are almost always available.

If one young person is about to make a decision, helping them construct options is relatively straightforward. Once they are clear about which values might be affected, they can generate different options likely to satisfy these qualities.

CGT was introduced by the Hawke Labor Government on 20 September 1985. Before this time, gains that were not of an income nature generally escaped tax unless they fell within a limited number of special statutory income provisions. One of these provisions was former s 26AAA ITAA36, which taxed profits made from selling property within 12 months of its purchase. However, taxpayers could easily avoid this provision by simply selling their property outside that period.

Many considered it unfair that income gains were taxed whereas capital gains generally escaped tax. For example, it was viewed as inequitable that taxpayers who earned salary and wages were taxed, but taxpayers who made capital gains from the realisation of their investments (eg shares and property) were not taxed. The CGT regime was designed to address this bias by bringing capital gains to account under a set of special statutory rules. These rules were originally contained in pt IIIA ITAA36 and were loosely modelled on the United Kingdom’s CGT legislation. In 1998, as part of the TLIP rewrite, pt IIIA was replaced with new provisions contained in pt 3-1 (ss 100-1 to 121-35) and pt 3-3 (ss 122-1 to 152-425) ITAA97.

Personal liberty can be viewed through the lens of the good or the right. Do we value liberty because it is part of our good, or a means to our good, or do we value it because it is our right to have it? This chapter considers the value of liberty from the standpoint of the good. The ethical environmentalism defended in previous chapters, it argues, must be sensitive to the value of liberty as a personal good. In an important sense, people only lead good lives if they lead free lives. The chapter begins with the common idea that there is, or ought to be, a general presumption in favor of liberty. It next considers deeper ideals of liberty, such as autonomy or authenticity, that can be appealed to in order to explain liberty’s value. These deeper ideals are shown to be genuine ideals but their value is qualified in ways that are not widely appreciated. The chapter concludes by considering expressive or conventional reasons for opposing coercive or manipulative liberty-reducing interventions. It argues that these reasons require a deeper explanation, and one that pulls us beyond the value of liberty understood as a personal good.

This chapter is an introduction to Stata. We note the essential features and commands of the Stata statistical software package. Our objective is to familiarize the reader with the skills that will allow them to understand and complete the examples in the later chapters of our book. We describe the main components of the interface, followed by those of each Stata file option, e.g., do file, log file, and graphs. The third section of this chapter gives examples that readers can use to practice the most commonly used commands. Last, we summarize best practices for data management.

Chapter 7 discusses China’s infrastructure development.It analyzes the ways in which infrastructure investment has been financed, including revenues from land sales, bank loans, infrastructure development funds, domestic and foreign debt, taxes, fees, and user charges. It shows the composition of funds for financing key infrastructures including transportation, telecommunication, energy, and sanitation. It demonstrates that China's infrastructures have grown rapidly in the past twenty-five years. It examines the reasons for the fast infrastructure development in China and the problems with infrastructure development, including a solid tax system, a pro-infrastructure spending system, expansionary fiscal policies, and large local government revenues from land sales and bank borrowings. It also evaluates China’s belt and road initiative and discusses the L17benefits and potential risks to the countries involved.

Chapter 10 tackles the controversial issue of high local government debt. It first examines sources of local government debt and clarifies that most of China’s local government debt is set apart from the government budget. It then estimates the size of China’s local government debt over time, scrutinizes the reasons for the fast debt accumulation, and evaluates the immediate impacts and potential problems of high local government debt. In this latter part, the size of government debt in each region is also estimated and the large disparities in government debt among regions are exposed. It shows that local government debt is rather high in some regions. It also shows that the size of local government assets is substantial. Thus, although high, China's local government debt is still manageable It finally discusses the measures China has taken to curb local government debt and offers suggestions for additional fiscal reforms needed for curtailing local government debt.

Definitions, specific risks, special needs, contraception for transmen and transwomen

If economics focuses on price representing value, we now shift to finance, which focuses on the connection of risk and return. We begin with the story of Wynn Kramarsky, a collector of works on paper (with his wife Sarah-Ann). Kramarsky’s parents had also owned Vincent van Gogh’s Portrait of Dr. Gachet. We go through a market primer including terminology of asset allocation and the logic of discounting cash flows and performing net present value analysis. We then review art market studies that use repeat sales and hedonic regression methods. The questions of this chapter try to connect the ephemeral, risk-taking, deeply uncertain work that happens in artists’ studios and to track the artwork from there to its status as part of an asset class.

Commodity exchanges have proliferated greatly since 2000, both in terms of places where the trade is conducted, and in terms of the products that are subject to trade. The main aim of this chapter is to describe these commodity exchanges, as well as the commodities traded there. The main instruments used, including their functioning, is presented as well as the main actors and their objectives. The chapter ends with discussing commodity exchanges impact on price formation, including the role of speculation.

This chapter examines official attitudes toward aliens in peacetime during the nineteenth century by focusing first of all on their rights in a period characterized by sovereignty, nation-building, solidification of borders and the issue and reform of citizenship laws on the one hand, and on the emergence of globalization, migration and the construction of an international society on the other. The chapter delves into the debates on the right of asylum, expulsion, expatriation, and examines early policies of migration control and the dilemma of reconciling rights and freedom of movement with emerging anti-alienism that precipitated into violence. The second part of the chapter concentrates on citizenship as a legal device, exploring first of all practices of collective acquisition of citizenship triggered by annexations of territories, creation of new nation-states, plebiscites and option regimes incorporated in international treaties. It then deals with individual acquisition and loss of citizenship (naturalization and denaturalization), paying particular attention to the gender dimension of citizenship, conscription, dual citizenship and the ethnic shift in citizenship practices and notions that began to emerge at the turn of the century.

Before analyzing how technological innovation has changed the financial markets, one must obtain a basic understanding of some terms and concepts that are necessary to understand these markets in the first instance. As mentioned in the Introduction, the United States has two market regulators: the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). In deciding to have two market regulators, Congress established a framework in which the SEC oversees the markets for securities, which include stocks in companies, as well as bonds, government securities, and even stock options and other types of derivatives that are considered to be securities under US law. The CFTC, on the other hand, governs the markets for futures contracts, commodity options, swaps, and other derivatives that the law does not categorize as securities. Some have criticized the fact that the United States has two market regulators, as opposed to one consolidated regulator for both securities and futures markets.

If you have ever wondered about the difference between “artificial intelligence” and “machine learning,” you are in luck. The purpose of this chapter is to provide background and context on key concepts in artificial intelligence (AI) and to touch on how AI tools are used in the financial markets. In recent years, hedge funds, banks, commodity trading advisors, and numerous other financial services firms have adopted AI systems and related tools from computer science to automate numerous aspects of their operations, so understanding basic AI concepts can provide insights into how these firms operate.

Most writers on negotiation (e.g. Cohen 2003; Fisher & Ertel 1995; Lax & Sebenius 2006; Thompson 2005) and most practitioners will acknowledge that good preparation leads to improved negotiation. However, there is little research specifically into how negotiators actually prepare. In one major commercial negotiation (the Tanker Refit case, examined more closely in Chapter 4), one of the parties invested a lot of time in collecting information to try to fully understand the situation they were negotiating about. In another major negotiation (the Telco JV case – see Chapter 12) the negotiators found themselves spending about two hours in preparation for each hour of meeting with the other party. On the other hand a team negotiating a major infrastructure contract spent very little preparation time together prior to their meeting with the potential customer (Lindholst 2015). What the negotiation literature does offer are preparation checklists that give some structure to a negotiator’s preparation (for examples, see Fisher & Ertel 1995; Fleming & Hawes 2017; Lewicki, Barry & Saunders 2015; Thompson 2005). These checklists vary in their advice, but they commonly include the need to set goals for the negotiation, as goals are believed to be an inherent aspect of planning (Futrell 2011; Wilson & Putnam 1990) and central to negotiation success.