The aim of this contribution is to discuss closely the implications of income inequality and the economic policies to tackle it, especially so in view of inequality being one of the main causes of the 2007/2008 international financial crisis and the ?great recession? that subsequently emerged. Wealth inequality is also important in this respect, but the focus is on income inequality. Ever since the financial crisis and the subsequent ?great recession?, inequality of income, and wealth, has increased and the demand for economic policy initiatives to produce a more equal distribution of income and wealth has become more urgent. Such reduction would help to increase the level of economic activity as has been demonstrated again more recently. A number of economic policy initiatives for this purpose will be the focus of this contribution.

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is twofold. First, the authors investigate the main drivers of house prices in the Hong Kong housing market. Second, further research is undertaken to confirm the existence of house price overvaluation, which has driven the market into a bubble episode.Design/methodology/approach: First, the authors propose a theoretical framework to identify the fundamentals of the market. In the second step, they decompose house prices into fundamentals, frictions and bubble episodes for a better understanding of the evolution of house prices during the period 1996(Q3)-2013(Q3).Findings: The results of this paper suggest an eventual possible correction of up to 46 per cent of house prices with respect to their 2013(Q3) level.Originality/value: The originality of this paper is to use the procedure developed by Glindro and Delloro (2010) to analyse the Hong Kong housing market. The contribution of this paper also modifies the original Glindro and Delloro’s (2010) approach by including the Christiano and Fitzgerald (2003) filter to decompose house prices.

The evolution of yields is one of the driving factors explaining crop supply growth. Part of this is explained by how yields react to prices, though there is a lot of uncertainty about the price-responsiveness of yields. Using information from various sources such as agronomy, economic theory and economic literature an in-depth assessment of yield price responsiveness is made. The result is used as a set of prior-information, which is subsequently taken into account to re-estimate yield price supply responses for 20 main crops in major producing developed and developing countries, using OLS and Mixed Estimation (ME) approaches. The outcomes indicate that price-responsiveness is usually low. Moreover, the ME results are different than the current estimates used in the OECD-FAO’s market outlook model, showing stronger differentiation among crops/countries. The Mixed Estimation is found useful to overcome typical problems encountered when estimating yield-price responsiveness, such as violations of economic theory, insignificance of estimated parameters and inconsistencies with agronomic knowledge regarding the size of the estimated responses.