International Symposium on Environmental Biogeochemistry

Question: Discuss about the International Symposium on Environmental Biogeochemistry. Answer: Introduction: Australia is a vast country richly supplied with natural minerals. The major minerals in Australia are Coal, iron ore, petroleum, copper, zinc, bauxite, natural gas etc. The mining industry started in about the late 20th century. In the current years, there has been a great change in the mining industry relating to production and processing of minerals (Reeson, Measham and Hosking 2012). This change will have its impact on the employment and wages of the laborers employed in mining industry. This change will also reflect on the sales and profit earned by the company thereby reflecting a change in the countrys economy (Downes, Hanslow and Tulip 2014). In this assignment, the change in mining pattern of the country has been studied. The effect of the change in employment pattern, wage of laborers, operating profit before taxes and the industry value added services has been tried to find out in this assignment. An outline idea about the data collection methods, analysis of the data are given in this assignment Problem statement The problem statement of this research work is to find out: 1. The change in mining patterns of Australia since 2010. 2. The effect of this change on employment pattern, salaries, operating profit in the industry. Research aim: The aim of this research is to find out 1. How the mining industry has altered over the years since 2000. 2. What is the impact of this growth in the employment, wages, profit of the industry. Research objective: The objective of the research is to study the changing pattern in the mining industry and the effect of this change on profit, employment, and wages of laborers in the industry. Research questions The questions of this research work are as follows: 1. What are the changes in mining industry since the year 2000? 2. What are the effects of this change in operating profit earned by the industry, employment and wage figures in the industry? Literature review: Mining industry in Australia is one of the primary industries of the country. Mining generates about 54 % of total goods and services of the country and contributes about 6-7% of countrys GDP. The industry employs about 2% of the laborers of Australia and also supports a large number of industries (Fleming and Measham 2015). The industry has contracted in the year 2014-2015over various important factors. The figures of value added of the mining industry have been decreased by 7.4%.The largest decrease happened in case of metal ore. Export prices have also fallen. Wage and employment growth rate has been decreased (Reeson, Measham and Hosking 2012). Variables and hypothesis: The main variables concerned in this study are production figures of different minerals, income or profit generated from selling these minerals, various other factors like wages, employment, inventories purchased etc. The production figures and income are independent variables. On the other hand, wages, employment, inventories to be purchased depends on the production figures. So these are dependent variables (Trudinger, Walter and Ralph 2013). The hypotheses that are to be tested in this research work are: 1. There is any seasonal or cyclical pattern in the production figures. 2. The employment, wage figures, cost of inventories are dependent on income figures. Operational definitions and measurements: The problem in this research work is to estimate the effect of change of income in employment status, wage value, labor and capital in the mining industry. The variables of income are measured in terms of millions of $. The other variables like wages, expenses, labor costs, and change in inventories are also measured in millions of $. The figures of employments are measured in number. Since the figures are for the whole mining industry and quite large, an error of about 5% can be tolerated. The data is secondary data has been collected from Australian Bureau of Statistics. The data is subjected to non sampling errors. Research design and methodology: The data collected here is a secondary data. The data is obtained in the form of an excel file from an organizations site. The data contains figures of employment, wages, sales and services, expenses, income etc. The relevant variables for this assignment have to be extracted from the table. No such constraints will be involved in doing this work. The research questions will be answered by applying suitable statistics analysis like regression and time series analysis on these variables. Data collection: The data collected for this research work is mainly the secondary data. The data can be collected from the site of Australian Bureau of Statistics. The data relating to mining operations and its impact on employment, wages and salaries of employees, total profit inventories, capital is obtained from the website. The data is a five years data from 2011(Search.abs.gov.au 2016). Data Analysis The data collected will be analyzed by using various statistical methods. The data on the mining and production of minerals is basically a time series data. The data can be analyzed using various time series analysis methods (Montgomery, Jennings and Kulahci 2015). The different components of time series have to be analyzed. The time series analysis includes: Trend: To determine if there is any trend in the values. Seasonal variations: To see if there are any seasonal variations in the values. Cyclical variations: To see if there is any oscillatory movement in the time series data. Irregular component: To see if there is any irregular movement in the values (Montgomery, Jennings and Kulahci 2015). Apart from these to see the impact of the changes on profit, laborer, wages, capital, cost, inventories a regression analysis has to be carried out. A linear regression can be fitted. The income is the independent variable and expenditure, wages, salaries are dependent variables. A significant value of the regression coefficient will indicate the variable has a major effect on the value of income (Grmping 2012). Conclusion: In this assignment, the change in production of coal and effect of the change in the different factors like wages, employment are being studied. The impact of the overall change on the mining industry is shown in this assignment. Further the future values of production figures can be estimated. This assignment will help the people of the country to get a deeper look into the problems faced by the industry and take preventive measures. References: Downes, P., Hanslow, K. And Tulip, P., 2014.The effect of the mining boom on the Australian economy. Reserve Bank of Australia. Fleming, D.A. and Measham, T.G., 2015. Local economic impacts of an unconventional energy boom: the coal seam gas industry in Australia.Australian Journal of Agricultural and Resource Economics,59(1), pp.78-94. Grmping, U., 2012. Estimators of relative importance in linear regression based on variance decomposition.The American Statistician. Measham, T.G., Haslam Mckenzie, F., Moffat, K. And Franks, D.M., 2013. An expanded role for the mining sector in Australian society?.Rural Society,22(2), pp.184-194. Montgomery, D.C., Jennings, C.L. and Kulahci, M., 2015.Introduction to time series analysis and forecasting. John Wiley Sons. Montgomery, D.C., Jennings, C.L. and Kulahci, M., 2015.Introduction to time series analysis and forecasting. John Wiley Sons. Reeson, A.F., Measham, T.G. and Hosking, K., 2012. Mining activity, income inequality and gender in regional Australia.Australian Journal of Agricultural and Resource Economics,56(2), pp.302-313. Trudinger, P.A., Walter, M.R. and Ralph, B.J. eds., 2013.Biogeochemistry of Ancient and Modern Environments: Proceedings of the Fourth International Symposium on Environmental Biogeochemistry (ISEB) and, Conference on Biogeochemistry in Relation to the Mining Industry and Environmental Pollution (Leaching Conference), held in Canberra, Australia, 26 August4 September 1979. Springer Science Business Media. Search.abs.gov.au. (2016). Searching: Australian Bureau of Statistics (www.abs.gov.au). [online] Available at: https://search.abs.gov.au/s/search.html?collection=absform=simpleprofile=_default_previewquery=mining [Accessed 24 Aug. 2016].