There has been a great deal of turnmoil in the Australian labour market over the past 25 years. This paper describes the main features of the changes which have occured over the principal dimensions of the work environment.

The social sciences in Australia heve been vey active in decribing, measuring, debating and seeking to understand inequality. This essay assesses how the social sciences have gone abour this research task, thier main conclusions and what we still do not know.

There have been rising levels of inequality in the earnings distribution in some OECD countries (principally the English-speaking ones) together with stubbornly higher levels of unemployment in many others. Australia has shared in the rise in earnings inequality, but not to the degree that the...

This paper examines wage differentials between public sector and private sector workers in Australia. After controlling for observed characteristics and individual fixed effects, we show that on average workers in the public sector earn about 5.1% percent more hourly wages than those in the...

Many people find their first employment in a low wage job. Others accept low wage jobs after a period out of the workforce or unemployed. An issue of vital social interest is the speed with which low wage workers move on to better jobs. This review of the international literature finds that the...