RBA warning: our supply-side problems have only just begun

In one of his last speeches for the year, Reserve Bank governor Dr Philip Lowe has issued a sobering warning. Even when we’ve got on top of the present inflation outbreak, the disruptions to supply we’ve struggled with this year are likely to be a recurring problem in the years ahead.

Economists think of the economy as having two sides. The supply side refers to our production of goods and services, whereas the demand side refers to our spending on those goods and services, partly for investment in new production capacity, but mainly for consumption by households.

Lowe notes that, until inflation raised its ugly head, the world had enjoyed about three decades in which there were few major “shocks” (sudden big disruptions) to the continuing production and supply of goods and services.

When something happens that disrupts supply, so that it can’t keep up with demand, prices jump – as we’ve seen this year with disruptions caused by the pandemic and its lockdowns, and with Russia’s attack on Ukraine.

What changes occurred over the three decades were mainly favourable: they involved increased supply of manufactured goods, in particular, which put gentle downward pressure on prices.

This made life easier for the world’s central banks. With the supply side behaving itself, they were able to keep their economies growing fairly steadily by using interest rates to manage demand. Put rates up to restrain spending and inflation; put rates down to encourage spending and employment.

The central banks were looking good because the one tool they have for influencing the economy – interest rates – was good for managing demand. Trouble is – and as we saw this year – managing demand is the only thing central banks and their interest rates can do.

When prices jump because of disruptions to supply, there’s nothing they can do to fix those disruptions and get supply back to keeping up with demand. All they can do is strangle demand until prices come down.

So, what’s got Lowe worried is his realisation that a lot of the problems headed our way will be shocks to supply.

“Looking forward, the supply side looks more challenging than it has been for many years” and is likely to have a bigger effect on inflation, making it jump more often.

Lowe sees four factors leading to more supply shocks. The first is “the reversal of globalisation”.

Over recent decades, international trade increased significantly relative to the size of the global economy, he says.

Production became increasingly integrated across borders, and this lowered costs and made supply very flexible. Australia was among the major beneficiaries of this.

Now, however, international trade is no longer growing faster than the global economy. “Trading blocs are emerging and there is a step back from closer integration,” he says. “Unfortunately, today barriers to trade and investment are more likely to be increased than removed.”

This will inevitably affect both the rise in standards of living and the prices of goods and services in global markets.

The second factor affecting the supply side is demographics. Until relatively recently, the working-age population of the advanced economies was steadily increasing. This was also true for China and Eastern Europe – both of which were being integrated into the global economy.

And the participation of women in the paid labour force was also rising rapidly. “The result was a substantial increase in the number of workers engaged in the global economy, and advances in technology made it easier to tap into this global labour force,” Lowe says.

So, there was a great increase in global supply. But this trend has turned and the working-age population is now declining, with the decline projected to accelerate. The proportion of the population who are either too young or too old to work is rising, meaning the supply of workers available to meet the demand for goods and services has diminished.

The third factor affecting the supply side is climate change. Over the past 20 years, the number of major floods across the world has doubled and the frequency of heatwaves and droughts has also increased.

This will keep getting worse.These extreme weather events disrupt production and so affect prices – as we know all too well in Australia. But as well as lifting fruit and vegetable prices (and meat prices after droughts break and herd rebuilding begins), extreme weather can disrupt mining production and transport and distribution.

The fourth factor affecting the supply side is related: the transition from fossil fuels to renewables. This involves junking our investment in coal mines, gas plants and power stations, and new investment in solar farms, wind farms, batteries and rooftop solar, as well as extensively rejigging the electricity network.

It’s not just that the required new capital investment will be huge, but that the transition from the old system to the new won’t happen without disruptions.

So, energy prices will be higher (to pay for the new capital investment) and more volatile when fossil-fuel supply stops before renewables supply is ready to fill the gap.

Lowe foresees the inflation rate becoming more unstable through two channels. First, shocks to supply that cause large and rapid changes in prices.

Second, the global supply curve becoming less “elastic” (less able to respond to increases in demand by quickly increasing supply) than it has been in the past decade.

Lowe says bravely that none of these developments would undermine the central banks’ ability to achieve their inflation target “on average” - that is, over a few years – though they would make the bankers’ job more complicated.

Well, maybe. As he reminds us, adverse supply shocks can have conflicting effects, increasing inflation while reducing output and employment. The Reserve can’t increase interest rates and reduce them at the same time.

As Lowe further observes, supply shocks “also have implications for other areas of economic policy”. Yes, competition policy, for instance.

My conclusion is that managing the economy can no longer be left largely to the central bankers.

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The real reason the budget may stay in deficit for the next 40 years

If you follow a rule that when a politician cries “look over there!” you make sure you stay looking over here, there’s much to be deduced from Treasurer Josh Frydenberg’s Intergenerational Report, before we put it up on the shelf with its four predecessors.

That’s especially so with a federal election coming by May next year. Elections are times when politicians try to convince us they can do the arithmetically impossible: cut taxes while guaranteeing adequate spending on “essential services” and getting on top of “debt and deficit”.

Intergenerational reports always involve sleight of hand. They’re always about getting us to focus on a certain aspect of the problem and ignore other aspects.

As Frydenberg admits, the five-yearly intergenerational reports “always deliver sobering news. That’s their role. It is up to governments to respond.”

He’s given us little idea of what that response will involve. But there’s little doubt about his sobering news: the budget is projected to stay in deficit in each of the 40 years to 2060-61.

And we’re left in no doubt about the stated cause of those deficits and growing government debt: excessive growth in government spending.

As the report’s authors confess in an unguarded moment, “the emphasis of the [successive intergenerational] reports rested on pressures that demographic change [that is, the ageing of the population] was likely to impose on future government spending”.

We’re told that, even after you remove the effect of inflation, government spending per person is projected to “almost double”. (And I thought only journalists were prone to exaggeration. “Almost double” turns out to be an increase of 73 per cent.)

Why the huge growth in real terms? Mainly because of huge growth in spending on healthcare, but also because of big growth in spending on aged care and interest payments.

Get it? Government spending will grow like steam because of the ageing of the population. Except that when you read the report’s fine print you find that’s not the main reason. Only about half the projected growth in health spending is explained by population growth and ageing.

The other half is explained by advances in medical “technology, changing consumer preferences and rising incomes”. That is, as Australians’ real incomes rise over time, they want to spend a higher proportion of that income on preserving their good health and living longer.

And improved medicines and procedures almost always cost more than those they replace. But voters won’t tolerate government delay in making the latest drugs and operations available under Medicare.

As for the projected greatly increased spending on aged care, only part of it’s due to the Baby Boomers eventually reaching their 80s. The rest is explained by “changing community expectations”.

That’s a bureaucrat’s way of saying that “after the royal commission confirmed all we’ve been told about widespread mistreatment of people in aged care, governments will have no choice but to stop doing aged care on the cheap”. That is, it’s the higher cost of better-quality care.

Expressed as a percentage of national income, spending on the age pension is expected to fall as bigger superannuation payouts put more people on part-pensions. And, even though this saving is projected to be more than offset by the increased cost to revenue of super tax concessions, the combined effect is that the retired will have a lot more money to spend than their parents did.

Now get this: whereas total government spending is projected to grow, in real terms, at an average rate of 2.5 per cent a year in the coming 40 years, this compares with growth of 3.4 per cent a year over the past 40 years.

So it’s not just that ageing doesn’t adequately explain the expected growth in government spending, it’s also that the projected 40 years of budget deficits can’t be adequately explained by excessive spending.

The real reason the spending horse is expected to outrun the taxing horse is that the taxing horse has been nobbled. At a time when the coronacession led to a huge blowout in the budget deficit, the government used this year’s budget to bring forward the second stage of its tax cuts, and will proceed with the third-stage tax cut in July 2024 despite the continuing deficits and rising debt.

Worse, the projections assume that, because projected tax collections would otherwise exceed the government’s self-imposed limit on taxation as a proportion of national income after 2035-36, we’ll be getting new tax cuts in each of the last 15 years up to 2061. Yes, really.

No wonder interest payments are projected to account for three-quarters of the budget deficit in 2060-61.

We can be sure Scott Morrison will go into the election campaign claiming the Liberals are the party of lower taxes. But what voters will have to decide is whether a re-elected Morrison government would “respond” to the Intergenerational Report’s projection of its existing policies by letting taxes grow, slashing spending on “essential services” or letting debt and deficit just keep keeping on.

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Our aspirations for a Big Australia need a big trim

Almost all the nation’s business people, economists and politicians believe too much population growth is never enough. But if there’s one thing I hope to be remembered for, it’s that I always subjected this case of group think to critical examination.

I remain to be convinced that a Big Australia would be better either for our material living standards or for our efforts to limit the damage our economic activity is doing to our natural environment – the erosion of the nation’s “natural capital”.

But, in any case, Treasurer Josh Frydenberg’s intergenerational report last week is a useful warning that our aspirations for a Big Australia need a big trim.

The pandemic is an immediate setback to such ambitions, but beyond that is the likelihood that most countries’ population growth is slowing and, in many countries, will eventually begin falling.

One big message from the report is that population growth over the next 40 years is projected to be much slower than earlier thought, with its size now expected to reach 40 million in the first half of the 2060s, about eight years later than the 2015 report projected.

This is explained by the pandemic, which is expected to cause a temporary fall in the birth rate and four years of below-average net overseas migration (foreigners arriving minus locals leaving). Annual net migration is expected actually to fall in the financial year just ended and in the new financial year, then take two years to return to 235,000 in 2024-25, at which level it then stays every year through to 2060-61.

That is, no catch-up is expected for the growth lost because of the pandemic. The assumed annual net intake of 235,000 is based on unchanged existing federal government policy on permanent and temporary migration levels.

The report’s “sensitivity analysis” shows that, were net migration projected to grow in line with the growing population (at a rate of 0.82 per cent a year) rather than stay at a flat 235,000 a year, real gross domestic product per person would be only a fraction higher in 2060-61, the labour force would be 1 million bigger and the old-age dependency ratio would be 2.8 workers per oldie rather than 2.7.

But you have to doubt whether future governments will remain free to just dial up their preferred level of annual immigration the way they have been over the past 40 years.

If there’s one demographic lesson we should have learnt by now, it’s that as families become more prosperous over the generations, they choose to have fewer children. This has become possible because of effective contraception.

Add growing longevity and you see why a declining fertility rate (expected number of births per woman), not just the retirement of the Baby Boomer bulge, has left all the developed economies with an ageing population. And, thanks to its one-child policy, the world’s most populous economy, China, also has a (rapidly) ageing population.

Like all the other rich countries, our fertility rate has long been below the population replacement rate of 2.1 babies per woman. Unlike most of the others, however, we’ve kept our population growing strongly by ever-increasing immigration.

To date we’ve had no trouble attracting all the skilled (and unskilled) workers we need, mainly from poor countries. We’ve even been able to make a lot of them pay full freight for their Australian-quality education before we scooped them up.

But with population ageing and old-age dependency ratios becoming more acute around the rich world, global competition to attract skilled workers from developing countries may become more intense.

On the other side of the equation, the supply side, as the poor countries become more developed, their living standards rise and their fertility rates fall, there may be fewer skilled workers willing to emigrate to the rich countries.

Population growth is already slowing in most developed and developing countries. It’s already falling in Japan and some European countries. It will start falling in China this decade. Our population growth is also likely to slow, and the day may come when – horror of horrors – it starts to fall.

Slower growth in the population means slower growth in the size of the economy, of course. But I can’t see why this should be a worry.

It’s notable that, though the intergenerational report projects a consequent slowing in economic growth over the next 40 years, it expects this to have little effect on economic growth per person and thus on living standards.

Whereas real GDP growth is projected to slow from 3 per cent a year over the past 40 years to 2.6 per cent over the coming 40, annual growth in real GDP per person is projected to slow only marginally from 1.6 per cent to 1.5 per cent.

Even that small slowing seems to be explained not by lower population growth, but by a similar fall in the assumed rate of average annual productivity improvement.

Taken at face value, this is an admission by the report’s authors that faster population growth makes little or no contribution to the improvement of our material living standards. The immigrants may gain by moving to Australia, but the rest of us don’t gain from their coming.

However, the report’s fine print (aka its technical appendix) advises that its projections “do not capture the broader economic, social or environmental effects of migration, such as technology spillovers or congestion”.

But if those effects were thought to be significant, you’d expect the authors to have made the effort to model them. And, of course, the effects are likely to be both beneficial and detrimental.

Looking at the economic effects, the advocates of high immigration always point to the benefit of greater economies of scale, while brushing aside the costs of the increased housing, capital equipment and public infrastructure that a bigger population and workforce must be provided with to ensure the productivity of its labour doesn’t fall.

Indeed, it’s possible our high rate of population growth is a factor contributing to our weak rate of productivity improvement.

Similarly, it’s inconsistent for advocates of high immigration also to be advocates of Smaller Government. When you’re causing congestion by failing to spend enough on the extra public infrastructure needed, including more schools and hospitals – perhaps because you’re trying to please discredited American credit-rating agencies – you shouldn’t be surprised if economic growth is weaker.

The need for governments to spend more on a bigger population is complicated and compounded by the division of responsibilities between federal and state governments. The budgetary costs and benefits of immigration are not spread evenly between federal and state governments.

The feds pick up most of the tax that immigrants pay, while the states pick up most of the cost of the extra infrastructure and services needing to be provided (especially since immigrants are denied access to many federal benefits for the first four years).

This reveals a major distortion in the intergenerational report’s continual claim that higher immigration does wonders to improve the budget. The federal budget, yes. But state budgets, probably the reverse.

Finally, there are the environmental consequences of a bigger population that both the intergenerational report and most business people, economists and politicians refuse to come to grips with.

Jenny Goldie, president of Sustainable Population Australia, reminds us that the intergenerational report “fails to take into account the environmental costs of urban encroachment on natural bushland, threatening iconic species such as the koala [and biodiversity more generally], and adding to carbon emissions.

“It fails to address the social costs of crowding, housing unaffordability and longer waiting times that generally accompany population growth,” she concludes.

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Business lobbies use the productivity slump for rent-seeking

It’s encouraging to see the scepticism with which this week’s intergenerational report from Treasurer Josh Frydenberg has been greeted. Any attempt to peer 40 years into the economy’s future will prove close to the mark only by happy accident.

But it’s discouraging to see the way the usual suspects have seized on the report’s most glaring weakness to do no more than push their vested interests in the name of “reform”.

This fifth version of the five-yearly intergenerational report allows us to see how far astray the report’s earlier projections have been, even though we’re only halfway towards the first report’s picture of the economy in 2041.

In their projections of growth in the population, its authors have repeatedly overestimated the fertility rate (expected number of births per woman) and underestimated the growth in net overseas migration (foreigners arriving minus locals leaving).

They predicted that the retirement of the Baby Boomers would see a fall in the rate at which people of working age participate in the labour force, but this “participation rate” has recently been at record highs.

It would be nice to think that, since the object of all these projections has been to alert us to looming pressures on the budget – caused, in particular, by the ageing of the population – governments have responded accordingly, thus making the reports’ prophecies self-defeating. Nice, but not likely.

The pandemic, and the expected four years of weak net overseas migration in particular, is rightly blamed for our population “growing slower and ageing faster” than previously expected. And slower growth in the size of the population means slower growth in the size of the economy.

We’re told that, whereas real GDP grew at the average rate of 3 per cent a year over the past 40 years, it’s now projected to slow to an average rate of 2.6 per cent over the coming 40.

But the justification for our obsession with economic growth is our desire for faster improvement in our material standard of living. And here’s a point Frydenberg hasn’t highlighted: according to the report’s calculations, the projected marked slowing in the economy’s overall rate of growth is expected to affect growth in GDP per person – a crude measure of living standards - only a little.

GDP per person’s average annual growth is projected to fall only from 1.6 per cent over the past 40 years to 1.5 per cent over the coming 40.

It’s here, however, that business and its media cheer squad have read the fine print and are deeply sceptical: that projection of GDP growth per person rests heavily on the mere assumption that the productivity of labour (output of goods and services per hour worked) will improve at the same average annual rate in the coming 40 years as it did over the past 30 years.

And they’re right. Of all the many assumptions on which the report’s mechanical projections depend, this assumption is far the most critical. As Frydenberg rightly says, improving productivity is what explains almost all the improvement in our standard of living over the decades.

And the sceptics are right to doubt that productivity will improve over the next 40 years at anything like the rate of 1.5 per cent a year. For a start, that 30-year average includes the 1990s, a decade when productivity improved at a rate far higher than experienced before or since.

For another thing, productivity improvement in recent years has been much weaker than usual.

So, purely by omission, the latest intergenerational report reminds us of the second biggest threat to our living standards: a continuing slump in productivity. (The biggest threat is the world’s inadequate response to climate change – another thing the report omits to take into account.)

What’s discouraging, however, is the way the business lobby groups have used this inadvertent reminder to bang the same old self-serving drum. The productivity slump has been caused by this government and its predecessors’ failure to continue the economic reform program begun by Hawke, Keating and Howard, we’re assured.

And what reforms do they have in mind? A cut in the rate of company tax for big business and changes in the wage-fixing rules to make the labour market more flexible for employers.

This lobbying is objectionable on three grounds. First, it implies that productivity improvement depends on an unending stream of changes in government policies, which is absurd. The day “reform” stops, productivity stops.

Second, it shifts the blame for weak productivity improvement from the actions of the private sector – in whose farms, mines, factories, offices and shops productivity either gets better or worse – to the politicians in Canberra.

Third, it seeks to disguise blatant rent-seeking as economic “reform”. Productivity would improve if business owners and high income-earners paid less tax, leaving the punters to pay more, and if the balance of bargaining power between bosses and workers shifted further in favour of bosses.

What this self-serving bulldust ignores is that productivity improvement has slumped in all the rich countries, not just in Australia because our pollies are so defective.

Michael Brennan, chair of the Productivity Commission, says the world’s economists are still debating the causes of the productivity slowdown.

They’ve pointed to “mismeasurement issues, a shift towards lower productivity industries, population ageing, a slowdown in the pace of technological discovery, a slowdown in the pace of technological diffusion, a plateauing of improvements in human capital, reduced rates of firm entry and exit, increased concentration and market power, lower capital investment, a shift to intangible capital and the slowing growth in global trade”.

As Melinda Cilento of CEDA, the Committee for Economic Development of Australia, has noted, “research by federal Treasury . . . showed leading Australian firms were not keeping up with leading global firms on productivity”.

Treasury would be much better employed continuing to research the causes of our productivity slump than doing literally unbelievable projections of what’s unlikely to happen over the next 40 years.

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Sorry, I'm too old to believe an ageing population is a terrible thing

If ever there was an exercise that, since its inception, has overpromised and under-delivered, it’s the alleged Intergenerational Report. A report on relations between the generations, on the legacy the present generation is leaving for the coming generation?

No, not really. If it was, it would be mainly about the need for us and the other rich countries to be acting a lot more seriously and urgently to limit climate change. The document Treasurer Josh Frydenberg unveiled on Monday is our fifth five-yearly Intergenerational Report.

Initially, the report made no mention of climate change. These days, following the obvious criticism, it always includes a brief chapter on the topic, before moving on to matters considered more pertinent.

This year the chapter runs to nine of the report’s almost 200 pages, in which the seriousness of the problem is acknowledged, along with the assurance “but don’t worry, I’m on it”. On every admitted dimension of the issue, we’re assured that reports have been commissioned, committees established and the government is spending $100 million on this and $67 million on that.

Another issue of relevance to relations between the generations is the ever-declining rate of home ownership as the price of houses rises ever higher. Can the aggrandisement of one generation at the expense of following generations continue? And are we content to witness the trashing of the Great Australian Dream? I found no discussion of this.

The sad truth is the Intergenerational Report is a creation of the Charter of Budget Honesty Act so, despite its grandiose name, it’s really only interested in the future state of the federal budget and in attempting to predict the size of the budget balance in 40 years’ time.

According to Frydenberg, the latest report delivers “three key insights”. First, our population is growing slower and ageing faster than expected. Second, the economy’s growth will be slower than previously thought. Third, while the federal government’s debt is sustainable and low by international standards, the ageing of our population will put significant pressures on both government revenue and its spending.

Get it? The real concern of this report – and its four predecessors – is what the ageing of the population looks likely to do to the federal budget over the next four decades. It thus echoes a longstanding concern of all the rich countries that the retirement of the Baby Boomers will put huge pressure on their budgets.

When you read the document minus the spin successive treasurers always put on it, this year’s version tells us what all five reports have told us: compared with the Europeans and Americans, we don’t have much of a problem.

The report’s big news is that our decision to close our borders as part of our response to the pandemic means our annual level of net immigration – foreigners arriving minus locals leaving – isn’t expected to return to normal until 2024-25.

According to Frydenberg, this is the first report “where the size of the population has been revised down”. But this is misleading. It doesn’t mean our population will fall, only that it won’t keep growing as fast as it has been and was expected to continue doing.

We’re now expected to have four years of below-normal net immigration, with no subsequent catch up. So whereas the previous report projected that the population would reach almost 40 million by 2055, it’s now expected to be no more than 39 million in 2061.

Since almost all the nation’s business people, economists and politicians believe too much population growth is never enough, this news will worry them. It doesn’t worry me. And I suspect most Australians will regard it as good news, not bad.

Frydenberg argues it’s bad because, since immigrants tend to be younger than the average Aussie, it will cause the population to age faster than was expected. This is arithmetically correct, but Frydenberg has given us an exaggerated impression of its extent.

He tells us that, in 1982, there were 6.6 people of traditional working age for every person over 65. Today, the ratio is down to 4.1, and by 2061 it will have fallen to 2.7. Wow. And what did the previous report tell us it would be down to by 2055? 2.7. Oh, no significant change.

Even so, isn’t that a worry? Not when you remember what economics teaches: that the economy adjusts in response to changing circumstances.

As Jenny Goldie, president of Sustainable Population Australia, has explained to the Treasurer, “as the working-age population shrinks and the labour market tightens, fewer people will be unemployed, and employers will improve wages and salaries to attract job seekers.

“This will have the effect of drawing more people into the workforce who were not working, or keeping people who would otherwise have retired.” Employers will no longer be able to afford their prejudice against hiring older workers.

If your instincts tell you not to believe those trying to convince you that people now living longer than they used to is a real worry, your instincts are right.

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There are delusions for young and old

There are things oldies tell young people that the youngsters should believe, and things they shouldn’t. One thing I wouldn’t believe is the confident predictions about the huge number of different jobs and careers they’re likely to have.

One thing I would believe is that eligibility for the age pension is likely to have risen to 70 by the time they get there, whatever Prime Minister Scott Morrison says about it being off the table.

I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve heard adults – usually teachers - assuring school kids they’ll end up having 17 changes in employer across five different careers.

It sounds as if it’s the conclusion of some careful scientific study by experts. But as far as I can tell, if there is such a study it’s been lost in the annals of time.

Which is a pity because other experts need to go back to such a study and tell us just how careful and scientific the study was. Doesn’t sound it to me.

Rather, the line’s become an urban myth – widely repeated and accepted as true because it’s so often repeated.

Those who peer into the “future of work” are always telling us the rising generation needs to be endowed with “21st century skills” such creativity, team work and critical thinking. True.

And our youth could start by applying some critical thinking to the prediction of exactly how many jobs and careers they’ll be having in a working life that hasn’t even started. More critical thinking than the silly adults who keep repeating a finding of whose origin and authority they know nothing.

A key critical-thinking question is: how on earth would you know? How could anyone, no matter how expert, look 45 or 55 years into the future and count the number of jobs and careers young people will end up having, even on average?

We can’t forecast with any confidence what the next five years will hold, let alone the next 55. Any genuine expert would hedge any guess they made with a dozen caveats and qualifications. Anyone who can be as certain as 17 and five is more entertainer than expert.

Do you remember when Julia Gillard dispatched Kevin Rudd in 2010? She had a to-do list of problems inherited from Rudd – including his mining tax and emissions trading scheme - that needed to be dispatched forthwith in readiness for an election.

Malcolm Turnbull’s successor seems to have a similar to-do list. Actually, the plan to raise the age pension age to 70 is inherited from Tony Abbott. It’s one of the few cost-saving measures remaining from the many included, but since abandoned, in Abbott’s first budget in 2014 – a budget so politically disastrous it has blighted the Coalition government throughout its life.

The higher pension age proposal was implacably opposed by Labor and Senate crossbenchers alike. It was already a dead letter and it’s no surprise Morrison has dumped it.

You can believe that, should Morrison be elected, he’ll stick to his promise. But the eligibility age wasn’t to reach 70 until July 2035, and a lot could change between now and then. Say, 17 prime ministers and five changes of ruling party.

We’ve been raising the pension age since the early 1990s and we still are. This has raised little controversy. So it’s not hard to believe that, by the time today’s school students are approaching 70, the age pension age will have drifted up from 67 to 70.

In 1993, the Keating government decided to increase the pension age for women from 60 to 65, phased in over 20 years.

In 2009, the Rudd government decided to phase up the pension age for men and women from 65 to 67, starting six years later. At present we’re up to 65 and six months, and it will rise by six months every two years until it reaches 67 in 2023.

Abbott’s plan was to wait a further two years then, from July 2025, raise the age by six months every two years until it reached 70 by 2035.

A point to ponder is that it was Labor governments that are getting us up to 67, even though Labor has so righteously opposed adding a further three years. Maybe it’s OK if they do it.

There’s no age at which people must retire. The rationale for raising the age at which we become eligible for retirement assistance from the taxpayer is we’re living ever longer, healthier lives.

That’s a good thing. But it comes at a cost to the community – particularly to younger taxpayers – if we insist that those extra years of healthy life must be spent in longer years of retirement rather than work, thus raising the proportion of non-workers to workers.

As I’ve noted recently, one way we’ve used to slow the ageing of our population is high levels of younger immigrants – but this too carries costs many people don’t want to pay.

The notion that retirement beats working is the great delusion of middle age. If the ever-diminishing minority of workers doing hard physical labour fear their bodies won’t last the extra few years, that’s partly why we have the disability support pension. We should stop stigmatising it.

If it’s too hard for older workers to find jobs, that’s an attitudinal problem among employers we should be – and are – reducing.

If workers find their jobs so unpleasant they can’t wait to retire, that’s a communitywide problem of misguided employers we should be correcting directly, to the benefit of all wage slaves.

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Immigration is sharply slowing the ageing of our population

Reserve Bank governor Dr Philip Lowe thinks Australia’s strong population growth in recent years is a wonderful thing, and he sings its praises in a speech this week.

I’m not sure he’s right. Like most economists and business people, Lowe is a lot more conscious of the economic benefits of population growth than the economic costs. As for the social and environmental costs, they’re for someone else to worry about.

But whatever your views, you’ll be heaps better informed after you’ve seen what he says about our changing “population dynamics” and absorbed his tutorial on demography.

Over the past decade, our population has grown at an average rate of about 1.6 per cent a year. This is faster than in previous decades. It’s also faster than every advanced economy bar Singapore.

Most other rich countries – including the US and Britain – grew by well under 1 per cent a year over the period. The populations of Italy, Russia and Germany were stagnant, and fell in Japan and Greece. China’s annual growth averaged only 0.5 per cent.

What’s driving our growth is increased immigration, of course. Over recent times, net overseas migration has added about 1 per cent a year to the population, with “natural increase” (births minus deaths) adding only about 0.7 per cent.

Our rate of natural increase is pretty steady. It perked up a bit a decade ago, but quickly resumed its slow decline, as more couples have smaller families and some have none.

Net migration, by contrast, goes through a lot of peaks and troughs – which, not by chance, correlate well with the ups and downs of the business cycle.

We think of the government controlling immigration with a big lever (making it “exogenous” or coming from outside the system, as economists say, pinching the word from medicos) but many demographers see immigration as “endogenous” or determined within the system.

This has become truer as permanent migration becomes dominated by workers with skills we need, rather than by family reunion, and there’s more temporary migration by overseas students and skilled workers brought in by employers to fill a temporary shortage.

The resources boom showed temporary skilled migration was great at helping us control (wage-driven) inflation, one of Lowe’s primary concerns as boss of the central bank.

But I worry our young people are paying the price for this greater macro-economic flexibility. We’re schooling our employers not to bother training plenty of apprentices ready for the next shortage because it’s easier to wait until the shortage emerges and then pull in a tradesperson or three from overseas.

Sorry, back to Lowe’s speech. He notes that growth in the number of people here on temporary visas adds to the size of our population. For instance, there are now more than half a million overseas students studying in Australia.

Here’s a stat you probably didn’t know: about a sixth of foreign students are permitted to stay and work here after finishing their studies. This boosts our population. Always a man to look on the bright side, Lowe reminds us it also boosts the nation’s “human capital”.

Plus, he’s too polite to say, it does so free of charge. It’s a neat trick: we charge foreign parents in developing countries full freight to educate their children, then allow the best of 'em to stay on.

But wait, there’s more: we also benefit from our stronger overseas connections when foreign students return home, Lowe says.

Now for his big reveal. Particularly because of our emphasis on skilled workers and students (as opposed to bringing out nonna and nonno), the median age of new migrants is between 20 and 25, more that 10 years younger than the median age of the rest of us.

At the time of Treasury’s first intergenerational report in 2002, our present median age of 37 was expected to rise rapidly to more than 45 by 2040. But after the past decade of increased immigration of young people, the latest estimate is that the median age will be only about 40 by then.

“This is a big change in a relatively short period of time, and reminds us that demographic trends are not set in stone,” Lowe says.

This means that, on the question of population ageing, and looking at the latest projections over the next quarter of a century, we compare well with other advanced economies, he says.

First, our median age of 37 makes Australia one of the youngest countries. We are ageing more slowly than most of the others, meaning we’re projected to stay relatively young. This is better than earlier projections suggesting we’d move to the middle of the pack.

Second, we have a higher fertility rate than most rich countries. Australians tend to have larger families than those in many other countries. (Note, not large, but larger than the others.)

Third, our average life expectancy is at the higher end of the range, and is expected to keep rising.

Fourth, our old-age dependency ratio – people 65 and older, compared to people of working age, 15 to 64 – is rising, but less quickly than in most other countries.

And our relative youth and higher fertility rate means our dependency ratio is expect to stay lower than other countries’ for the next 25 years or so. Only then is it projected to rise rapidly.

The first intergenerational report expected that the disproportionate bulge of baby boomers reaching normal retirement age would lead to a steady decline in the proportion of people participating in the labour force.

It hasn’t happened. The reverse, in fact – for fascinating reasons I’ll save for another day.

To economists, this slower rate of population ageing – that is, slower rise in the old-age dependency ratio – is great news. It means the economy’s growth in coming years won’t slow as much as they were expecting (see point above about the participation rate).

It also means ageing will put less pressure on future federal and state budgets. But let me give you a tip: there are so many other pressures we probably won’t notice its absence.

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Econocrats doubt our ability to grow

So, how fast can we expect the economy to grow over the next 40 years? And, more to the point, where's that growth supposed to come from? That's a doubt you expect from people without the benefit of an economics education, but the intergenerational report reveals the econocrats are going through a crisis of confidence about growth.

First, a disclaimer: not being as materialist as the economists, I don't see maximising our material standard of living as the ultimate objective. I worry more about what climate change and resource depletion will have done to the economy in 40 years' time, and the social price we'll be paying for our obsession with the material.

But back to the dominant paradigm.

The report projects that growth in real gross domestic product will slow to an average rate of 2.8 per cent a year over the next 40 years, down from 3.1 per cent a year over the past 40.

A third of this decline is explained by slightly slower population growth, leaving average growth in real GDP per person falling from 1.7 per cent a year in the past to 1.5 per cent a year in the future.

I trust you're suitably shocked and dismayed. This projected decline is explained essentially by the ageing of the population, leaving the average rate of improvement in the productivity of labour unchanged between the past and the future at 1.5 per cent a year.

So, where will the growth be coming from? Exclusively from improving productivity: from the economy's output of goods and services growing faster than its inputs of labour.

It's productivity the econocrats and other economists are so pessimistic about. So how did they estimate that productivity will grow by an average of just 1.5 per cent a year?

They didn't. They simply followed previous practice and plugged in the same figure for the coming 40 years as for the past 30. Since it's impossible to know what will happen to productivity in the future, this neutral assumption is better than any other you could make.

But that hasn't stopped some economists from claiming that 1.5 per cent a year is overly optimistic. Really? This tells you something about the reigning mood of pessimism among economists.

But if income per person is driven by productivity improvement, what drives productivity? If you rely on the things economists say in public, you could be forgiven for not knowing that overwhelmingly – and for the past 200 years – it's technological advance.

Every economist knows that's true but they rarely say so. That's partly because they know little about how technological advance works and partly because they believe there's little they can do to affect it.

But in recent years, some leading overseas economists have lost their faith that rapid technological advance will continue lifting material living standards. Two centuries of innovation have hit a dry spot, we're told.

It seems Treasury agrees. It admits a fact rarely included in economists' unceasing sermons on the evil of our low rate of productivity improvement in recent times: "Australia has not been alone among advanced economies in experiencing slower productivity growth over the 2000s, which suggests that the rate of growth in technological advance . . . may have been slower than in previous decades."

So if we can't rely on a continuing stream of new technology to keep our living standards growing at a rate economists find acceptable, what does Treasury suggest? It was hoping you'd ask because it's got just the solution we need: more microeconomic or "structural" reform.

For several years, all right-thinking economists have been badgering us to pressure governments for more micro reform. To bolster its argument that micro reform is the missing elixir, Treasury says "the increase in productivity growth rates seen in the 1990s is widely attributed to significant policy reforms of that decade and the 1980s".

But even if you believe this (I'm sceptical), it's hardly a great advertisement for the benefits of reform. You can make the most sweeping reforms – reforms which, having been made, can't be repeated – and all you get for your pains is four or five years of improved performance before lapsing back into mediocrity.

Reform, we're asked to believe, is only a fleeting fix. To maintain an acceptable rate of productivity improvement, reform must be unceasing (and defy the law of diminishing returns).

This portrays our economy as hopelessly inefficient and unproductive, despite all our efforts. Other countries can grow satisfactorily without continuous reform, but we can't.

Really? Such a view is so deeply pessimistic as to verge on economic apostasy. It's also bizarre.

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How Australia's supply of labour is changing

The trouble with the way the media report developments in the labour market from one month to the next is that we don't get a sense of the major shifts that occur over time.

So today let's take a much longer view, examining the trends over, say, the two decades from 1993 to 2013. We'll do so with help from an article by Professors Roger Wilkins and Mark Wooden, of the Melbourne Institute, published in the latest issue of the Australian Economic Review.

Note that this period covers most of the continuous economic upswing since the severe recession of the early 1990s. So most of the trends are reasonably good. It's true, however, that we were knocked off track briefly by the global financial crisis of 2008-09 and in more recent years have suffered a slow deterioration in unemployment as the economy makes heavy weather of the end of the mining investment boom.

But that's getting ahead of the story. Actually, it's such a long story that today I'll limit it to the side that gets least attention from the media, changes in the supply of labour. It's best measured by changes in the "participation rate" – the proportion of the population of working age who are participating in the labour market by making their labour available, either by having a job or actively seeking one.

Taken overall, the "part rate" increased pretty strongly until 2008, when it began falling back. But all of this overall increase is explained by the increased participation of women, particularly those of prime age, 25 to 54.

There's been a long-term slow decline in the participation of men. It's explained partly by young males staying longer in the education system but mainly by older workers retiring earlier – voluntarily or otherwise.

But here's where the story gets complicated. The trend to earlier retirement turned around at about the turn of the century, with participation by both men and women aged 55 and over rising significantly.

Got that? Now try this. Although more people are retiring later, the part rate reached a peak in 2008, has fallen since then and is likely to continue falling for years yet. Why? Because of the ageing of the population.

The trick is that even if the part rate is now rising in older age groups, population ageing means that an ever-rising proportion of the labour force is in those older age groups, whose rates of participation will always be a lot lower than the rates for people of prime age.

To show the significance of this ageing effect, the authors calculate that if the age structure of the population in 2013 was the same as in 1993, the overall part rate would be 2.2 percentage points higher than it actually is.

However, we do have some scope to moderate this demography-driven decline in participation. Wilkins and Wooden note that the rates of participation for 55 to 64-year-olds are between 7 and 14 percentage points higher in New Zealand than they are in Oz. If the Kiwis can do it, what's to stop us doing it?

The part rate covers the quantity of people willing to supply their labour, but there's also the question of changes in the quality of the labour being supplied.

The past 20 years have seen a big improvement in the skills – education and training – of the labour force, with the proportion of university graduates more than doubling from 12 per cent to 28 per cent. The proportion with any post-secondary qualification rose from less than 46 per cent to more than 62 per cent.

By the way, it's likely that the continuing rise in women's participation is largely explained by the dramatic increase in females' academic attainment. The higher men and women's level of education, the greater the likelihood they'll be in the labour force – exploiting the commercial value of their skills – and the less the likelihood of them being unemployed.

Of course, another part of the labour supply story is immigrant workers. Immigration has long been a major source of additional labour and today accounts for more than a fifth of the labour force. What's changed is that throughout the last century most migrants came on permanent visas, whereas today most come on temporary visas.

In March last year there were almost 900,000 people on temporary visas with work rights, including more than 200,000 on "457 visas" for skilled people and about 370,000 on student visas. If all these people actually participated they'd amount to 7 per cent of the labour force, the authors estimate.

Separate to this were almost 650,000 people on the special visas for New Zealanders, some of whom will prove to be only temporary residents. (Don't forget Aussies have reciprocal rights to work in Kiwiland.)

We now grant about 125,000 457 visas a year and about 100,000 student visas a year. This compares with about 130,000 old-style permanent visas a year to skilled immigrants, many of which are given to people already here on temporary visas.

The authors observe that the shift towards temporary migration has probably had a big effect on the labour market.

"The availability of a flexible skilled immigrant workforce that can respond to changes in labour demand relatively quickly is likely to have improved the operation of the labour market, especially from an employer perspective," they say.

Oh. Yes. To me the main drawback is not so much that employers may not try hard enough to find local workers to fill jobs, or that the availability of this external supply may limit to some extent the rise in skilled wages, but that it reduces employers' incentive go to the bother of training young workers.

Still, we mustn't forget that, these days, the economy is run for the benefit of business, not the rest of us.

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We face a year of furious debate leading to very little

Let me start my year with a confession: listening to the Australian of the Year, Rosie Batty, arguing at length for more attention to be paid to domestic violence, my first thought was she was laying it on a bit thick. There are lots of problems in the world and domestic violence is just one of them.

But then another thought occurred: this year we'll be listening to hundreds of men banging on about problems far less important than domestic violence. The vast majority of the problems we hear about - and I write about - will be economic. Is the economy speeding up or slowing down? Will the Reserve Bank cut interest rates at its next board meeting?

Above all, they'll be worried about preventing a slowing in the rate of improvement of our standard of living. That is, they'll be almost wholly concerned with the material, tangible aspect of our lives. Few will concern the more feminine, airy fairy "social" side of our lives.

For the most part, our politicians will leave such touchy-feely concerns to single-issue campaigners such as Rosie Batty. They focus on the really big, important issues, and think about the lesser, social issues only when the Rosie Battys gain enough public support for the pollies to decide they'd better be seen doing something.

Truth is, the political year we face won't be any fun (except for the media). It will be another year in the difficult education of not-so-young Tony. He's having trouble learning what John Howard well knew: even prime ministers don't have much power to do as they please.

You can push through a few silly self-indulgences, such as reinstituting knighthoods, but even that will cost you politically. And what you can't do is reshape the world in a way that favours the rich and powerful while the rest of us nod approvingly.

This year a lot of ugly chickens will come home to roost. Part of the way Abbott got himself elected was to promise he'd do nothing unpopular in his first term. All the "reforms" being urged on him by the big end of town would be inquired into and, if it was decided radical changes were needed, they'd be taken to the next election for voter approval.

Abbott dragged his feet in commissioning these inquiries, but it will be full-on this year. Ostensibly, much of the agonising will arise from our refusal to contemplate paying higher taxes in return for greater government services and from the Coalition's claim to be able to achieve lower taxes.

In reality, the problem is the government's refusal to solve its revenue problem by cracking down on all the rorting of the tax system by business and high income-earners. Turns out many of these people are prepared to make an exception to their fatwa against higher taxes: surely an increase in the goods and services tax wouldn't hurt?

We face a year of contention as business rent-seekers seek to further advantage themselves, all in the name of much-needed "reform" and ensuring the continued rapid rise of our material standard of living (starting, of course, with theirs).

But ask yourself this: can you really see the ever-popular Tony going into next year's federal election with a proposal to increase the GST or any planned industrial relations changes his opponents could characterise as the restoration of Work Choices? And, even if he did, can you see him winning?

See? We face a year of furious economic and political debate leading to very little.

If you haven't guessed, I'm not facing such a year with any enthusiasm. And Rosie Batty reminds me we'll be earnestly debating over running repairs to the capitalist system while largely ignoring the social issues that, for far too many of us, stop our high material standard of living from translating into a high quality of life.

Take the question of increased longevity. Joe Hockey has signalled we'll be hearing a lot about this after the release of another intergenerational report in a few weeks' time.

The pollies will pay quick lip-service to the notion that living longer may not be such as bad thing, before portraying it as a terrible problem threatening "unsustainable" growth in government spending on pensions, aged care and healthcare.

But I have good news for those who obsess about the economic while ignoring the social. There is increasing evidence that how long people live is strongly influenced by the quality of their relationships with family and friends, particularly their face-to-face contact.

Around the world there is evidence of the number of people's very close relationships declining, of more people living alone and increasing loneliness. Australia is unlikely to be an exception.

So the solution to the fiscal longevity problem is at hand. All we have to do is hope people's intimate relationships continue to decline and loneliness continues to increase. And the best news is we've already instituted the main policy response needed: malign neglect.

Of course, it would speed things up if we were to step up the federal and state funding cuts to community organisations that help people in need. I'd start with Meals on Wheels. And don't forget that ignoring the obesity epidemic will do much to stop babies living to 150.

I reckon we should make it a national KPI to get life expectancy down to 75 by 2055.

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You were a stranger, so we wouldn't take you in

Do you get the feeling we're becoming a more selfish nation? While other countries were pitching in, we hesitated until this week to send experts to help stem the outbreak of Ebola. Sending people to risk their lives in wars doesn't seem a problem, but to send people for humanitarian reasons is asking too much when their personal safety can't be guaranteed.

This comes on top of our decision to slash the planned increase in official overseas aid. Sorry, but we just can't afford to be so generous. Others may look on Australia as among the richest countries in the world, but they don't understand we have our own problems.

We're running a budget deficit, and will be for many years yet. Borrowing money to cover gifts to poor foreigners hardly makes sense. And don't try telling me there are other, less-deserving people whose assistance could be cut.

As Joe Hockey has explained, our top income-earners are already being taxed too heavily to cover our bloated and unsustainable government spending, so this budget was designed to spare the lifters and require the leaners to bear a fairer share of the burden. And how could we make our own pensioners and sick people tighten their belts while we're being so generous to foreigners?

Hugh Mackay, the social commentator, tells us we've reversed the original meaning of the saying that charity begins at home. It used to mean don't demand charity of others until your own giving is up to scratch, but now it means we shouldn't be helping outsiders while any of our own remain in need.

But nowhere is our lack of charity more evident than in our hard hearts towards boatpeople. How dare they turn up on our doorstep uninvited, expecting us to put them up?

In the past, when asylum seekers were found to be genuine refugees, with a "well-founded fear of persecution" should they return to their own country, they were allowed to stay and included in our annual quota for "humanitarian" immigration.

For years we've discharged our obligation to help with the world's asylum problem by accepting just under 14,000 refugees a year for settlement in Australia. If that sounds like a lot, it represents 0.06 per cent of our population of 23.7 million. It's little more than 7 per cent of our total permanent settler intake of 190,000 a year.

For some reason - troubled conscience, perhaps - the Gillard government upped the humanitarian intake to 20,000 a year in 2012-13, but fortunately the Abbott government has returned it to fewer than 14,000.

Much more affordable. Our loathing of boatpeople is so intense that we tend to think of them as nothing more than a drain on the public purse. And for the first few years that's true.

But in a speech Professor Graeme Hugo, a demographer from the University of Adelaide, delivered to the annual conference of the Kaldor Centre for International Refugee Law in Sydney on Monday, he argued that humanitarian settlers eventually make a significant economic contribution.

Consistent with our more self-interested approach to immigration, these days we favour those who possess the skills - including language skills - of which we're most in need. Compared with these people, refugees are unpromising material for building the economy.

Some may have mental health issues arising from their treatment in their home countries, their experiences in transit or the kindly reception they receive from us. Many have low levels of literacy and limited skills and qualifications; few have great proficiency in English.

Those who do have qualifications will have lost their documentation, or won't have them recognised. They know little about our labour market, they often lack family networks in Australia, their family is split up and they bring no savings with them.

So, yes, in their early years many refugees aren't in the labour force and, among those who are, unemployment is high - higher than for other immigrants. Many of the younger ones you may expect to be working are still in the education system, catching up.

And yet their participation in the labour force rises with the length of time they've been here, converging towards the participation rate of the Australia-born, Hugo says. And their second generation end up having higher participation levels than Australia-born. They're also more highly qualified than Australia-born.

The humanitarian intake has other attractions. Refugees tend to be younger than other migrant groups, with a higher proportion of children, meaning they make a greater contribution to slowing the ageing of the population.

Their fertility is slightly higher. Predictably, their rate of returning home is very low compared with other migrants, and the proportion willing to settle in regional areas - almost 18 per cent - is high and rising.

Personal experience and common sense suggests all migrants who uproot themselves to move to Australia have a fair bit of get-up-and-go, with a determination to make the most of the new opportunities for themselves and, particularly, their kids. Hugo says people who move tend to be among the risk-takers.

Migrants tend to be more entrepreneurial - more likely to start their own businesses - and there's increasing evidence humanitarian settlers contain a disproportionate share of entrepreneurs.

On the BRW Rich List in 2000, five of the eight billionaires came from a refugee background. I wonder how generously they gave to charity.

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The good news about ageing

Politicians and economists have been banging on about the ageing of the population for ages, but how much do we actually know about the likely economic consequences? Not much - until now.

We've been told incessantly that ageing spells bad news for the budget - greatly increased spending on pensions and healthcare - with ageing used to help justify the harsh spending cuts proposed in this year's budget.

In truth, it has suited the powers-that-be to exaggerate ageing's effect on the budget. And oldies are right to resent the way ageing has been presented as nothing but a terrible problem. If the fact that we're living longer, healthier lives is a "problem", it's the best kind of problem to have.

So let's ignore the budget and focus on ageing's other economic consequences, some of which are good. We'll do so with help from a speech given last week by Dr Christopher Kent, an assistant governor of the Reserve Bank.

Kent says population ageing is driven by three factors: the boom in babies in the early years after World War II (1945 to 1960), the subsequent sharp drop in fertility rates that created a baby-boomer bulge, plus rising longevity thanks to decades of prosperity and advances in medical science.

The authorities have been warning about the coming consequences of ageing for so long - and how bad it will be by 2040 - that I suspect many people have given up waiting for it to start.

Well, get this: although it's got a long way to go, it's already started. The baby boomers have been retiring since the turn of the century, thus reducing the share of the population that's of usual working age (15 to 64).

Kent says that, taken by itself, ageing is estimated to have subtracted from the labour force participation rate by between 0.1 and 0.2 percentage points a year over the past decade and a half. This effect has increased a little in recent years as baby boomers have begun reaching 65.

Point is, ageing's biggest and most obvious effect is not on the budget, it's on the labour market. Everyone alive contributes to the demand for labour, but only those of us willing and able to work contribute to its supply.

So ageing constitutes a reduction in the supply of labour relative to the demand. That suggests we can expect it to cause unemployment to be lower than otherwise (which is not to say it won't continue to go up and down with the business cycle).

Since Australians have worried that there aren't enough jobs to go around ever since the middle of Gough Whitlam's reign, that sounds like good news to me. We're in the process of switching from not enough jobs to not enough workers.

(What I wonder is how long it will take for our mentality to shift. The perception that there's never enough jobs is now so deeply ingrained that any shyster with a profit-making scheme he claims will "create jobs" is greeted as a hero and demands that he be showered with subsidies.)

And with demand for labour stronger than supply, this implies upward pressure on wages. Again, sounds like good news to me. Kent adds that the converse of higher wage rates is lower returns to capital.

Kent points out that the pressure on labour supply will be felt most by industries that rely more heavily on labour, mainly service industries. Prominent among those industries will be aged care and healthcare, of course.

But, Kent adds, there's likely to be scope for labour to be reallocated among service industries, with a lower proportion of young people meaning we'll require fewer workers to care for and educate children.

There'll also be relatively less demand for workers to produce goods. That's for several reasons. First, because older people tend to devote less of their spending to goods and more services.

Second, because all of us tend to spend an increasing share of our rising incomes on services. There are limits to our consumption of food, wearing of clothes and how many TVs, fridges and cars we can cram into our house.

Third, because of its greater reliance on machines, the production of goods is more amenable to continuous improvement in labour productivity than is the production of services. As one economist famously observed, you can't improve the productivity of a quartet by reducing the number of players.

All this implies the prices of services are likely to rise relative to those of goods.

But now, gentle reader, if I've trained you well enough you'll have noticed a weakness in my argument so far. I've described only the immediate effects of ageing - what economists call the "first-round effects".

That's where most people's analysis stops, but economic analysis keeps going. One of the most important questions economists ask is: "And then what happens?" It's the second-round and subsequent effects economics is supposed to illuminate.

Seen from an economist's mindset, what I've described is a change in relative prices: the price of (or return on) labour relative to the price of (or return on) capital. The prices of services relative to the prices of goods.

Kent says it's important that these relative price changes not be prevented from occurring. Why? So market forces can go to work on them, adapting to them, modifying them and, to some extent, reversing them.

The higher relative price of labour should encourage more middle-aged people to take jobs and more oldies to delay their full retirement, thus reducing the upward pressure on wages a bit. The higher relative prices of services should encourage more people to acquire the education and training needed to work in the services sector.

And greater longevity should encourage workers to save more for their longer time in retirement.

That's what happens in market economies: things adjust.

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The news on our health is good

It's good news week. There are lots of bad things happening in the world and journalists regard it as their job to dig them out and wave them in front of your face. No piece of disheartening news should go unreported.

But good things are happening, too. And I often think people would enjoy reading the news more if we didn't ignore so many of them.

One of the main jobs of the federal government's Australian Institute of Health and Welfare is to produce a report card on the state of Australia's Health every two years. The latest edition is just out and it's crammed with good news.

Perhaps our most basic desire is to delay our death, and on this score we're doing particularly well. "Australians have one of the highest life expectancies in the world and can expect to live about 25 years longer, on average, than a century ago," the institute says.

In 1910, a baby boy could expect to live for 55 years and a baby girl 59 years. Today it's 80 and 84. That puts us sixth highest on the world league table for boys and seventh for girls, but the countries coming top - Iceland and Japan - beat us by less than two years. And we leave the Yanks for dust.

Of course, that's just for babies. Those of us who survive beyond our youth can expect to live longer again. A man turning 65, for instance, can expect to live another 19 years to 84. Women can expect another 22 years to reach 87.
All that's on average, of course. It happens because, by the time you reach 65, you've successfully avoided having your life cut short by accidents or other causes of premature death. You've become one of those who'll exceed the at-birth average.

But even if we are living longer, is that so wonderful if it means we're spending more years living with some kind of disability? Well, some disabilities are worse than others. And my guess is most people would tell you that, though their particular disability isn't fun, it beats the alternative.

The news is better than that, however. The institute's figuring shows that as our years of life are lengthening, our years of living with disability aren't increasing commensurately. And though they're increasing slowly for women - to almost 20 years for a newly born girl - they're falling slowly for men, to less than 18 years for baby boys.

The rate of daily smoking has been falling for 50 years, from 43 per cent of adults in 1964 to 16 per cent today. Quitting smoking can increase your life expectancy by up to 10 years if you do it early enough.

The institute says vaccination is one of the most successful and cost-effective health interventions. And the proportion of five-year-olds who've been vaccinated rose from 79 per cent to 92 per cent over the four years to 2012. Thank God for the nanny state.

The proportion of new cases of cancer each year is steady - kept up by the ageing of our population - but rates of death from cancer are continuing to fall. Over the 20 years to 2011, the mortality rate for all cancers fell by 17 per cent to 172 deaths per 100,000 people.

This is because of reduced exposure to the risk of cancer (such as fewer smokers), improved prevention (such as better sun protection), advances in cancer treatment and, for some cancers, earlier detection through screening programs (bowel, breast and cervical).

The reduction was mostly the result of falls in lung, prostate and bowel cancer deaths among men, and falls in breast and bowel cancer deaths among women.

The five-year survival rate from all cancers has increased from 47 per cent to 66 per cent over the past 20-odd years. And among people who've already survived five years, the chance of surviving for at least another five is 91 per cent.

There's been a 20 per cent fall in the rate of heart attacks in recent years and death rates from heart disease have fallen by almost three-quarters over the past three decades. The rate of strokes has fallen by 25 per cent in recent years and the death rate from strokes has fallen by more than two-thirds.

In just over 20 years, the death rate from asthma has fallen from a peak of 6.6 per 100,000 people to 1.5 deaths. The rate of people being hospitalised for asthma has fallen by 38 per cent.

And the rates of death through most causes of injury - accidents, drowning, suicide and homicide - are down by 3 per cent to 5 per cent in less than a decade.

We're even feeling better. More than half of those 15 and over consider themselves to be in excellent or very good health, with another 30 per cent saying their health is good. This is up a bit on a similar survey in 1995.

What's more, even the oldies are feeling pretty good. Among people aged 65 to 74 living in households, more than three-quarters rated their health as excellent, very good or good. Among those 75 and older, it was two-thirds.

It would be wrong to think everything about our health and healthcare is fine but, just this once, we'll celebrate what's going right.

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Why weaker demand means lower pay rises

Just about everyone assumes we can never have enough jobs. So it's funny that our unending discussion about how the economy's growth is doing rarely delves into the detail of what's happening in the labour market.

But that's what Dr Chris Kent, an assistant governor of the Reserve Bank, did in a speech last week. He shows it really is a market, with the demand for labour interacting with the supply of labour to help determine the price of labour (wages) and the quantity demanded (employment). Unlike textbook markets, however, this one never "clears" - there's always some labour left unsold (unemployment).

It shouldn't surprise you that, in studying developments in the labour market in recent years, one big thing stands out: the effect of the resource boom as it moves through its three stages of high export prices, booming mine construction and rising production of minerals and energy.

The demand for labour is "derived" demand - it flows from the demand for goods and services. To produce those things you need machines and workers. The more you produce, the more workers you need.

For most of the two years since the middle of 2012, the economy (real gross domestic product) grew at less than its 3 per cent annual trend rate, held back by the decline in mineral export prices, the decline in mining construction, the high level of the dollar and the weak growth in public demand (government spending).

A big part of the problem was that the downturn in mining-driven activity came at a time when the non-mining economy was subdued.

This below-trend growth in the production of goods and services meant weaker growth in the demand for labour, as we can see from the various indicators of labour demand.

The rate of unemployment is high relative to its recent history. The rate at which people of working age (15 years and above) are participating in the labour force, either by holding a job or actively seeking one, is at about the lowest it's been over the past eight years. And since 2010 there's been a significant decline in the ratio of employed people to the working-age population.

It's true the economy seemed to grow more strongly in the last quarter of 2013 and the first quarter of 2014. And we can see some small improvement in the indicators. Using the trend estimates, employment grew by 0.7 per cent over the first five months of this year, unemployment seems to have stabilised at 5.9 per cent and the participation rate at 64.7 per cent.

But much of the growth in real GDP over the past two quarters has come from greatly increased production and export of minerals and energy, as newly built mines start working. Trouble is, mines are so capital-intensive that all this extra production would have created few extra jobs.

So, for once, the growth in real GDP overstates the increase in demand for labour. Kent suspects the growth in employment is explained partly by slightly stronger growth in the non-mining economy and by a catch-up from weaker-than-you'd-expect employment growth last year.

If so, we're not out of the woods yet. And Treasury's forecast is that unemployment will have risen a little further to 6.25 per cent by June next year.

Now let's turn to the supply of labour. At the most basic level, growth in the population of working-age adds to the supply of labour, whether that growth comes from "natural increase" - more young people joining than old people retiring - or immigration.

But not everyone of working age chooses to participate in the labour force, of course. And, in practice, changes in the participation rate are a key indicator of the strength of labour supply.
Kent says growth in labour supply has slowed substantially over the past year or so, with the "part rate" down from 65.1 per cent.

This is a sign of the interaction between labour demand and supply: when demand is strong, more is supplied, but now it's vice versa. So it's usual for the part rate to fall during periods of weak demand.

"As jobs become more difficult to find (at the prevailing wage), some individuals become discouraged from searching," Kent says. If they are still available to work these people are "discouraged workers", many of whom will resume the search for work when conditions improve.

But Kent says that, since 2010, the rise in the number of discouraged workers accounts for only less than a quarter of the fall in the part rate. Some of these other people may have chosen to make themselves unavailable to work by embarking on a period of study or accepting involuntary early retirement.

But another, more structural, factor helping to explain the fall in the part rate is the ageing of the population. Ageing means a higher proportion of the population is in older age brackets which tend to have lower rates of participation. (And if oldies are still working, they're more likely to be part-time).

Kent says ageing is estimated to have subtracted between 0.1 and 0.2 percentage points a year from the part rate over the past decade-and-a-half. But now the rate is a clear 0.2 points. In recent decades this purely demographic change has been offset by the decisions of individual oldies to continue working, but now this second trend seems to have stopped.

In textbooks, prices adjust automatically to bring supply and demand into balance. In the real-world labour market, it ain't that simple. Even so, the weaker demand for labour has seen wage growth decline to well below its average over the past decade. Pay rises of more than 4 per cent are now far less common and rises of 2 to 3 per cent are more common than 3 to 4 per cent. So are rises of 1 per cent or less.

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We're a nation of stay-at-homes

Would you be surprised if I told you the resources boom and its two-speed economy had led to a big increase in the number of people shifting between states? No, I thought not.

Well here's my surprise: it hasn't gone up, it has gone down. Research by Professor Jeff Borland, of the University of Melbourne, finds that the rate of interstate migration has declined over the past decade.

The eternal lament of oldies (me included) is that we're getting more and more like America. But this is one respect in which we aren't. The Americans are inveterate movers between states, but we have never moved as much as they do, and now even fewer of us are doing it.

"Australians have never been big movers," Borland says. "Most of us complete our schooling in the same state. We're not likely to shift states to find employment if we lose our jobs. And when we move in retirement, this is mostly to another place in the same state."

Borland's paper shows that, in 2003, the proportion of the population moving between states was 2.1 per cent. Last year it was just 1.5 per cent, a decline equivalent these days to 130,000 fewer people.

This was the lowest rate for at least 40 years. And it was no flash in the pan. It was the continuation of a decline that's been occurring steadily for 10 years. The rate of interstate migration rose between the mid-'70s and the late-'80s, then stayed pretty stable at about 2 per cent a year until the early noughties.

The rate of decline was reasonably similar in all states, with one exception. No, it wasn't Western Australia. It was Queensland. And Queensland's share of the decline wasn't disproportionately smaller than for the other states, it was larger.

The decline has occurred among people of all ages. But that's not to say people of all ages are equally likely to pack up and move interstate. They aren't.

Borland finds that the peak ages for state migration are the 20s and 30s. "People above 40 years move progressively less as they get older," he says.

If we take the example of the late 1990s, one in 25 people aged 20 to 24 moved interstate in the previous year, whereas for those aged 70 to 74 it was one in 200.

So why has interstate migration declined? If moving tends to be concentrated among people in their 20s and 30s, could such migration be down because, with the ageing of the population, people in that age range now constitute a smaller proportion of the total population?

No, the overall decline is explained by declines in all age groups, although it's true that the decrease has been larger at younger ages.

It seems clear to me that most interstate migration is work-related. Or, as Borland puts it, "suppose we think of the main rationale for interstate migration as being to match the location of the population to the location of jobs".

In that case, could the decline in movement between states be caused by less reallocation of jobs between states? Doesn't seem so. An index of the annual change in the distribution of employment by state shows no downward trend in the extent of change.

So what is the reason? Borland isn't certain, but he finds evidence to support the idea that the change is in the behaviour of recent immigrants to Australia, not that of people long resident here. There's been an increase in the correlation between the states immigrants first come to and the states where employment is growing fastest.

My guess is it gets back to the Howard government's move to a much greater proportion of skilled migration, with greater employer nomination of migrants via 457 visas. Migrants are now more likely to come straight to a particular job than to land in Sydney or Melbourne and start hunting for one somewhere in Oz.


RIVALRY between the Coalition and Labor can reach petty levels. The budget papers always had white covers until the Rudd government decided dark blue would be a good reform. Under the Abbott government they've reverted to white.

For many years the federal government spelt "program" the way this newspaper does. But John Howard, spiritual son of Bob Menzies, insisted it revert to the fancy English spelling. Labor changed it back to the no-bulldust way. Now Tony Abbott, spiritual son of Howard, has reverted to "programme".

Pedants who know their stuff know the Poms - including Shakespeare in his day - used the simple spelling until the 19th century, when it was prettied-up during a bout of francophilia.

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