Australia has experienced a varied track record on unemployment. For the third quarter of the 20th century unemployment averaged 2.0 per cent. This is bracketed by average unemployment rates of 8.6 and 7.4 per cent in the second and fourth quarter centuries. Explanations of this phenomenon vary....

The R word has begun to appear in the media again bringing with it three technical questions viz, How will we know we are in recession? How will we know when it has ended? And How can we forecast its onset and ending? This paper does not provide answers to these questions rather it focuses on...

Experience from the United Kingdom and the United States suggests that expert evidence is often reshaped and repackaged by governments so that it supports existing policy rather than informing policy decisions. The Australian government based its decision to introduce FuelWatch on evidence in...

National accountants treat as consumption all expenditure incurred in purchasing consumer durables and in forming intangible assets such as knowledge, education and good health. The case is made in this paper that the national accounts measures of saving and investment understate both the extent...

There are a plethora of measures of Australia’s international price competitiveness. This article provides a practitioners guide to those series. The currently available measures of international price competitiveness are found to be deficient. A theoretically sound measure is suggested and...

The decision to introduce a national FuelWatch scheme provides a timely case study of `evidence-based- policy' making in Australia. The government based its decision on econometric work by the ACCC who refuse to release the data. They claim that their analysis is robust because it has been...

Using data supplied by InformedSources I find additional flaws in the ACCC analysis of FuelWatch. First, the drop in petrol prices that is so visually convincing in the ACCC chart S1 is in fact an artifact of the method of data construction and can be attributed primarily to increases in prices...

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the Australian Industry Group / PricewaterhouseCoopers Performance of Manufacturing Index (Ai-PMI) as a tool for analysis. Particular interest focuses on the issue of how useful it is as an early signal of Australian business cycle turning points.

This note provides evidence of neglected seasonality in the "seasonally adjusted" Australian national accounts

A survey of 1800 small and medium sized businesses is used to shed light on the number of workers covered by minimum wage legislation in Australia. Estimates are obtained and reported of the employment effects of changing the way in which minimum wages are set in Australia.