Like many industrialised economies in the pre-depression era, Australia elected to maintain a highly protectionist trade policy regime and hence to retard its integration with the global economy. The rationale for Australia’s protectionism was, as elsewhere, the enhancement of worker welfare....

Australia is notably, if not notoriously, a land of much space but few people. Its population density is, correspondingly, almost the lowest of any country in the world: only Namibia and Mongolia record a lower figure. Australia's extreme divergence from the common human experience has been a...

A critique is advanced of the contention of Obstfeld and Rogoff (1983) that in a fiat money regime, 'speculative hyperinflations can be excluded only through severe restrictions' on preferences. It is maintained here, in contrast, that no more than the infinity of the marginal utility of real...

It is argued that inflation creates private incentives for (socially costly) inside money to supplant (socially costless) outside money. Consequently, the familiar 'shoe leather cost' of inflation, that operates through a reduced demand for money under inflation, is supplemented by a separate...

This paper advances a theory of the supply of inside money that is squarely based on optimisation, and which sets out from the question, 'As outside money has an opportunity cost that a mere promise to pay outside money does not, why is outside money used at all?'. The theory identifies the...

The paper interprets the neoliberalism' of Friedman, Hayek (and others), as a partly successful doctrinal reformulation of 'historical liberalism' that certain material realities had by the mid-20th century proved solvent of. It argues that in the post-War period it was the doctrinal...

The paper addresses one of the disappointments that the liberal has faced intermittently over the past two hundred years: the apparent lack of relish by the public at large for democracy.

Keynes famously claimed 'soon or late, it is ideas, not vested interested which are dangerous for good or evil'. His neoliberal critics have frequently concurred with this contention, and have happily used the example of Keynes to illustrate it. But is 'the power of ideas' consistent with...