There has been a large decline in the volatility of Australian output over the past 40 years. This paper looks at the causes of this decline. Accounting for part of the change have been substantial changes in the inventories cycle. Abstracting from changes in the inventories cycle there have...

In this paper we examine the information content of business survey information, focusing in particular on some of the characteristics of the net balance statistic. A number of Australian business surveys are appraised. Four aspects are examined: the extent to which surveys are correlated with...

The real exchange rate is an important concept in economic theory, but it is not directly observable and must be constructed, usually as an index. The construction of such indices requires a number of decisions – which currencies to include, the appropriate weighting scheme and the price...

Measured inflation records many shocks that are not representative of the persistent component of inflation. Several methods are used to construct measures of core inflation which abstract from these unrepresentative shocks; this paper focuses on trimmed means. Analysis of Australian CPI...

We examine how the structure of Australian production and trade has been affected by the expansion of global production networks. As conventional measures of international trade do not fully capture the impact of global supply chains, we present complementary estimates of value-added trade for...

We use state-space methods to construct new estimates of Australian gross domestic product (GDP) growth from the published national accounts estimates of expenditure, income and production. Across a range of specifications, our measures are substantially less volatile than headline GDP growth....

This paper quantifies the links from demand for Australia's natural resources to activity in other domestic industries by using structural relationships embedded in input-output tables. Extending the methodology of Kouparitsas (2011), we estimate the size, growth rate, and industry value-added...

We examine two important aspects of Australia’s terms of trade using 135 years of annual data up to 2003/04. Since Australia predominantly exports commodities and imports manufactures, the Prebisch-Singer hypothesis suggests that there should be a negative trend in the terms of trade. But the...