In this chapter, we compare the experience of Australia and New Zealand over the period of microeconomic reform that began in the early 1980s. Of particular concern is the question of how New Zealand, with what were seen at the time as the ‘best’ set of economic policies in the OECD,...

The debate over theFree Trade Agreement with the United States has produced a book, How to Kill a Country, primarily concerned with intellectual property and related issues (Weiss, Thurbon and Matthews 2004). In arguing that Australia will be worse off, Weiss, Thurbon and Matthews examine four...

The worldwide scare over the 'Y2K bug result in the expenditure of hundreds of billions of dollars on Y2K compliance and conversion policies. Most of this can be seen, in retrospect, to have been unproductive or, at least, misdirected. In this paper, the technological and institutional factors...

Microeconomic reform dominated Australian economic policy from the early 1980s until the end of the 20th century. Despite strong claims of success, focusing on the economic expansion since 1992, and rapid productivity growth between 1993-94 and 1998-99, evidence of improvements in the...

The idea that preferences may be state-dependent fits naturally with an analysis of uncertainty based on explicit representation of random variables as state-contingent consumption or production bundles. In this paper we show how these concepts of risk-aversion may be extended to the case of...

The chapter is organised as follows. Section 1 is a historical survey of the fluctuating fortunes of economic liberalism from its eclipse after 1914, to its resurgence in the 1990s, and ending with evidence that economic liberalism has lost ground since the late 1990s, particularly in the...

This chapter argues that Australia’s labour market – indeed most capitalist labour markets – feature too much unemployment and underemployment and associated forms of labour market insecurity or disadvantage. The later term implies a weak or tenuous connection to the labour force through...