New Zealand’s average income, defined as GDP per capita, is now three quarters that of Australia and even lower than in Australia’s poorest state, Tasmania. Over the last seven years, New Zealand has grown slightly faster than Australia,but at these rates, it would still take 140 years to...

In the 1970s, work hours in Europe were similar to work hours in America, but today Europeans work less than Americans. Prescott (2004) attributes the decline in European work hours to an increase in the effective marginal tax rate on labour income. The Australian labour market experience...

The Coles Group of Australia has allowed its competitive advantage to slip away to rival Woolworth by failing to differentiate its core strategies and by failing to articulate well the strategies that could have been differentiated. In a bid to gain competitive advantage, this report suggests...

While the world is focused on addressing the near-term ramifications of the COVID-19 shock, we turn attention to another important aspect of the pandemic: its fallout on medium-term potential output through scarring. Taking Australia and New Zealand as examples, we show that the pandemic will...

To examine how government spending affects the Australian economy, we apply a vector autoregressive (VAR) model, based on the recursive approach of Caldara and Kamps (2008). The estimation results suggest that (i) the government expenditure shock has positively contributed to Australia's...

This paper demonstrates effects of economic convergence processes on the foreign exchange behaviour in a monetary modelling approach. Since the exchange rate represents the relative price of two currencies, commonness of stochastic trends between the fundamental determinants of supply and demand...

The existence of a stable demand for money is very important for the conduct of monetary policy. It is argued that previous work on the demand for money in Australia has not been very satisfactory in a number of ways. This paper examines the long- and short-run determinants of the demand for...

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...

This paper examines the influences of the two largest developed economies, namely the US and the Euro area, on Australia as an exemplar of a small open economy. To do so, we specify and estimate a structural VAR with bilateral linkages between the two large economies, and allow shocks...