The last major contraction experienced by the Australian economy took place over the period 1989/90 - 1992/93. In that period aggregate employment fell by 7.5% in Victoria but only by 2.9% in New South Wales. This paper aims to do two things. First, to explain why there is such a large...

In this paper we examine unemployment rate dispersion across the (statistical) regions in the Melbourne metropolitan area. We find that the level of dispersion is positively correlated with the unemployment rate in all the regions taken together and that the ‘elasticity’ of dispersion with...

Trade in services has outpaced trade in merchandise over the last two decades. The services sector has increased steadily in importance both in terms of it shares in GDP and employment over the lat 30 years in Australia and its contribution to trade will continue to increase. The significance of...

There has been a significant shift in trade policy orientation in Bangladesh over the last two decades. A dirigiste policy orientation has gradually been replaced by a more outward oriented economic policy. In line with such policy orientation, a series of trade liberalisation measures has been...

In an open economy like Australia, SMEs ability to export has become very crucial for their long-term servival and growth. This depends on SMEs capacity to remain internationally competitive. Productivity growth is the key which will enable SMEs to deliver products at lower costs. The results...

In this paper we examine the volatility of aggregate output and employment in Australia with the aid of a frequency filtering method (the Butterworth filter) that allows each time series to be decomposed into trend, cycle and noise components. This analysis is compared with more traditional...

Our paper revisits Okun's relationship between observed unemployment rates and output gaps. We include in the relationship the effect of labour market institutions as well as age and gender effects. Our empirical analysis is based on 20 OECD countries over the period 1985-2013. We find that the...