A Productivity Commission staff working paper on 'Workforce Participation Rates: How Does Australia Compare?' (by Joanna Abhayaratna and Ralph Lattimore) was released January 2007. With the population ageing and the associated shift in the age structure of the population towards older groups...

This paper aims to provide an overview of the changing role of part-time work in Australia and was released on 12 June 2008. The objectives of the paper are to - provide a comparison of part-time work in Australia and overseas, and possible reasons for our relatively high reliance on this form...

The Productivity Commission Staff Working Paper, ‘Men not at Work - An Analysis of Men Outside the Workforce’ (by Ralph Lattimore), was released in January 2007. This paper analyses the characteristics of adult men outside the labour force in Australia. The paper finds that, in contrast to...

Births in Australia are at an historical high - with around 285 000 babies born in 2007. This corresponds to an estimated total fertility rate of 1.93 babies per woman, the highest since the early 1980s. This is not a one-off event as fertility rates have been generally rising for the last 6...

This paper aims to provide an overview of the changing role of part-time work in Australia and was released on 12 June 2008. The objectives of the paper are to: * Provide a comparison of part-time work in Australia and overseas, and possible reasons for our relatively high reliance on this form...

The mid-term review of the WTO Doha Round of trade negotiations held recently in Cancun was concluded in a premature fashion by the hosts. Participants were not moving forward towards a process that would see the talks move towards a final agreement in 2004. This was a disappointment for New...

One of the major themes in New Zealand economic development thinking has been concerned with the balance of trade, industry and infrastructure policy that should accompany entrepreneurial activity. A new era of export development began in the early 1980’s with the introduction of a ‘more...

Very little is known about the basic income and price responsiveness of New Zealand food markets. As far as we can determine, there has never been a complete disaggregated food demand model estimated for New Zealand. In a famous article, Court (1967) estimated a demand system for three red...

Pressures for the reform of agricultural policies in wealthy countries will increase. Current policies are expensive and inefficient and impose substantial costs on countries that cannot afford to subsidize their agricultural sectors. A major political impediment to policy reform is the real or...