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...

This paper constructs coincident indices of Australian economic activity using techniques for estimating approximate factor models with many series, using data that begin in the early 1960s. The resulting monthly and quarterly indices both provide plausible measures of the Australian business...

This paper demonstrates that factor-based forecasts for key Australian macroeconomic series can outperform standard time-series benchmarks. In practice, however, the advantages of using large panels of data to construct the factors typically comes at the cost of using less timely series, thereby...