Is economic reform worsening productivity?

The North Atlantic economies have pressing problems to grapple with, but here at home the biggest thing we have to worry about is our weak rate of productivity improvement. And we won't get far if we stick to the received wisdom it's all the fault of excessive government intervention.

If our econocrats want to preserve their monopoly over the advice their political masters seek, they need to be less model-bound in their thinking. Since it doesn't take much thought to realise ''more micro reform'' is unlikely to make a big difference, we need more lateral thinking.

Rather than merely assuming market failure wouldn't be a material part of the problem - or assuming nothing could be done to correct market failure that wouldn't make things worse rather than better - perhaps we should look harder to see if market failure is part of the story.

After all, it's the market that's failing to generate as much productivity improvement as it has in the past.

Then we could start looking for cleverer forms of intervention that don't end up being counterproductive. Here we could put a lot more effort into evaluating interventions, so as to build up our understanding of what works and what doesn't.

The acute government debt problems in the United States and Europe are a reminder of how much more fiscally disciplined our governments have been, going right back to the Hawke-Keating government with its various budget limits and targets.

It's a great temptation to give the public the ever-increasing government spending it demands, but then fail to summon the courage to make people pay the extra taxation needed to cover that higher spending.

For all their failings, however, our politicians have achieved balanced budgets on average over the cycle and have kept government debt levels - federal and state - quite low and manageable.

But could it be we've paid for our fiscal responsibility with lower productivity improvement? It seems clear we've been underspending on public infrastructure as part of our efforts to keep debt levels low, but adequate public infrastructure is needed to permit the private sector to raise its own productivity.

As well as physical capital there's human capital. As part of our abstemiousness, we've gone for several decades underspending on all levels of education and training: early childhood development, schools, vocational training and universities. Particularly universities.

If we've gone for so long underspending on human capital, is it any wonder our productivity performance has worsened? It's true the Rudd-Gillard government has loosened the purse strings in recent years, but there's safe to be a delay before that leads to an improvement.

Another possibility worth exploring is whether the microeconomic reforms of the past have had unintended consequences that damaged our productivity.

Micro reform is almost always aimed at increasing firms' efficiency by subjecting them to great competitive pressure - whether from rivals in the domestic market or from imports.

But the human animal has achieved the great things it has not only as a result of competition between us but also as a result of our heightened ability to co-operate in the achievement of common objectives. The economists' conventional model is big on competition, but sets little store by co-operation, since it assumes we're all rugged individualists. Could it be that, by greatly increasing the competition most firms face in their markets, micro reform has reduced the amount of productivity enhancing co-operation?

A further possibility is that, in turning up the heat of competition in so many markets, and in spreading market forces into areas formerly outside the market, micro reform has diminished our ''social capital'' in ways that adversely affect economic performance.

There's no place for trust, feelings of reciprocity or norms of socially acceptable behaviour in the economists' model, so they tend to under-recognise their importance. But you only have to observe a loss of trust within the community to realise the high cost that loss imposes on the economy as well as society.

The less we feel we can trust each other, the more avoidable costs we impose on the economy in spending on supervision and monitoring, security devices and security people.

Micro reform seeks to increase the community's income without paying any attention to the equitable distribution of that extra income. If higher earners end up with more than their fair share, the disaffection of those who lose out may detract from their productivity.

It seems clear the increased competitive pressure on firms has led many to take a more ruthless attitude towards their employees.

Firms are more anti-collective bargaining, more prone to laying off staff as soon as business turns down, more willing to award huge pay rises to executives without a thought as to how this might make other employees feel, more inclined to pay some workers more than their peers, more inclined to expect people to work split shifts or on weekends and public holidays without extra pay and more likely to demand unpaid overtime (which last does increase measured productivity, however).

Is it so hard to credit that all this might have made workers less co-operative and productive rather than more?

In the Treasury Secretary's recent speech on our poor productivity performance, Dr Martin Parkinson nominated health and education as the next candidates for major micro reform. He's right, there's plenty of scope for improvement.

But these are service-delivery sectors where it's the performance of professionals that's crucial. And economists' notions about what motivates people and how you encourage excellence are so blinkered - they assume money is the only incentive and key performance indicators work a treat - that you'd have little confidence their ''reforms'' would make things better.

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The real action is in the developing world

If the US, the world's biggest economy, starts to contract again and the Europeans' government debt problems prompt more austerity, the world economy will be plunged back into recession. Is that what you think? If so, your picture of the world economy is about 20 years out of date.

There are cultural, historical, family and language reasons why we focus our attention on Europe and the US. The media keeps us well informed about what's happening in their economies. And since, between them, they account for a big chunk of the world economy, it's easy to assume that where they go the rest of the world follows.

Indeed, that used to be true. When I first got into this game, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development used to make forecasts for its 24 rich-member countries, add them up and call it the world economy.

But consider these figures from the Reserve Bank's latest statement on monetary policy. Over the four-and-a-bit years since the March quarter of 2007, the world economy has grown by about 10 per cent in real terms.

The contribution of the North Atlantic economies (the US, Canada, Britain and the euro area) to that growth was near enough to zero. So all the net growth the world's seen in that time has come from the remaining, mainly developing, economies.

Between them, the Chinese and Indian economies have grown by nearly 50 per cent, while east Asia (excluding China and Japan) grew by almost 20 per cent.

The faster the developing countries grow relative to the rich countries, the larger their share of the world economy becomes. An article in The Economist points to the many respects in which the world economy is coming to be dominated by the "emerging economies", as they're increasingly called.

As many as 11 of these economies have emerged to the point where they've been reclassified as developed rather than developing. But when you do that, you understate the extent to which the developing countries are taking over the running. So the figures that follow classify as developing all those countries that hadn't made it to developed status before 1997.

The developed countries account for only about 15 per cent of the world's population, but in 1990 they accounted for 80 per cent of gross world product. By last year that share had dropped to 60 per cent. It is projected to fall to less than half within the next seven years.

But that calculation is based on converting each country's gross domestic product into US dollars at market rates. This understates the developing countries' share of gross world product (GDP) because one US dollar buys a lot more in poor countries than in rich countries.

When you adjust for "purchasing-power parity" you find the developing countries' share of gross world product reached 50 per cent three years ago and is expected to reach 54 per cent this year. Their share of world exports has reached half, which is almost double what it was in 1990.

Much of these exports would be produced by multinational companies operating in developing countries, so it's no surprise the developing countries attract more than half of all the inflows of foreign direct investment.

So far, this conforms to the popular perception of developing countries as economies that make their living selling cheap exports to rich countries. But The Economist observes that "foreign firms are increasingly lured by these countries' fast-growing domestic markets as much as [by] lower wages".

That's the point: developing countries are increasingly standing on their own feet, generating their growth internally.

The mainstays of "domestic demand" are capital (investment) spending and consumer spending. The developing countries now account for more than half the world's capital spending, compared with a quarter 10 years ago.

Last year the US's capital spending was just 16 per cent of its GDP compared with 49 per cent in China. (Ours was 28 per cent.)

The developing countries' share of world consumer spending is only 34 per cent, though this is up from 24 per cent 10 years ago (and would be higher if you allowed for the lower prices they pay for housing and services).

Even so, their shares are: 46 per cent of world retail sales; 52 per cent of all new car sales (up from 22 per cent in 2000) and 82 per cent of all mobile phone subscriptions.

You can see from this how rapidly living standards are rising in poor countries. And when the locals start spending, some of that spending is on imports. Last year the developing countries' share of world imports rose to 47 per cent.

So whereas we're accustomed to thinking of developing countries as dependent on rich countries, it's becoming more the case that the rich countries depend on the developing countries.

Even so, because the developing countries are still at the early stages of developing their economies, their demand for basic commodities - whether locally produced or imported - exceeds their demand for sophisticated goods and services.

They account for 60 per cent of the world's annual energy consumption, 65 per cent of all copper consumption and 75 per cent of all steel use. Yet, as The Economist remarks, there's plenty of room for growth: they use 55 per cent of the world's oil but their consumption per person is still less than a fifth of that in the rich world. (Always assuming we don't run out of oil, of course.)

And here's a pertinent reason the developing countries are likely to continue growing faster than the North Atlantic economies: they're responsible for only 17 per cent of the world's government debt.

No prize for having guessed the punchline: the rich countries likely to do best over the rest of this troubled decade are those most closely plugged into the developing world.

Heard of a poor, cautious, sorry-for-itself country called Australia? It sells less than 10 per cent of its exports to Europe and only 5 per cent to the US, but about two-thirds to developing countries.

Most of those countries are in Asia, of course, the most dynamic part of the world economy. In just the past 10 years, China's share of our exports of goods and services has gone from 5 per cent to 23 per cent, and India's has risen from 2 per cent to 7 per cent.

As Wayne Swan keeps saying, Australia is in the right place at the right time.

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Sorry to be so sober. World not ending

At times like these, much of the media tends to cater to people who enjoy a good panic. The sky is falling and the proof is that billions have been wiped off the value of shares in just the past few days. Which makes me wonder how I've survived in the media for so many years. I hate panicking. So I'm always looking for contrary evidence. I just have hope there's a niche market of readers who prefer a sober assessment.

A bane of my working life is the way people imagine the state of the sharemarket to be far more important than it is in the workings of the economy. Our response to big falls in the sharemarket is based more on superstition than logical analysis, and a lot of people who should know better are happy to pander to the public's incomprehension.

We have a kind of race memory - a relic from the 1930s - that tells us a sharemarket crash is invariably followed by an economic slump. It ain't. As the Nobel-prize winning economist Paul Samuelson once quipped, ''the stockmarket has predicted nine of the past five recessions''.

Do you remember the crash of October 1987? No, probably not. There's no great reason to. It was the biggest fall on Wall Street since the Great Crash of 1929. People were panicking on that day in 1987 much as they are now.

A commentator senior to me predicted on page 1 it would lead to a global depression. In my comment - which was relegated to an inside page - I predicted no worse than a world recession. Fortunately, my thoughts were billed as ''The End Is Not Nigh''.

Turned out we were both way too pessimistic. What transpired? Precisely nothing. Neither in America nor here. In Australia the economy motored on for more than another two years before a combination of the subsequent commercial property boom and many more increases in the official interest rate finally brought us the recession we had to have.

The trouble with taking the sharemarket as your infallible guide to the economy's future is that the market itself is prone to panic. As its practitioners admit, its mood swings between greed and fear. Like all financial markets - and like the media - it acts in haste and repents at leisure. You can panic today because you can always change your mind tomorrow.

That's fine when onlookers don't take the market's antics too seriously. When they take its mood swings as authoritative, however, their reactions can cause those antics to have adverse effects on the ''real'' economy of spending and jobs that we inhabit.

In other words, what's important is not the ups and downs of the sharemarket, but the way we react to them.

In 1987, a lot of ordinary people who'd bought shares during the boom rushed out and sold them - thus buying high and selling low, precisely the opposite behaviour to the way you make money from shares. But the public soon shrugged off its anxiety and it wasn't long before the market recovered its lost ground.

Of course, a lot of things have changed since that great non-event of 1987. In those days, the link between the sharemarket and our daily lives was quite tenuous. These days, the link is much stronger thanks to the advent of compulsory superannuation - which has given most of us a fair stake in the sharemarket - and the baby boomers' proximity to retirement.

These days a sustained fall in share prices knocks a noticeable hole in people's retirement savings. That hole will refill in time, but who's to say how long it will take? Another difference with 1987 is that, this time, the sharemarkets in Wall Street and Europe really do have things worth worrying about. The American economy is quite weak and, although it's unlikely to drop back into recession unless Americans will it to, it's likely to stay pretty weak for the rest of the decade.

It's the Europeans who have by far the most to worry about, with so many heavily indebted governments locked into the euro and banks that are still in bad shape.

But yet another thing that's changed since 1987 is our economy's reorientation away from America and Europe towards China and the rest of Asia. Much of the fear that rises in our breasts on hearing of crashing sharemarkets is our unthinking conviction that what's bad for them must be bad for us.

It ain't so - not unless we unwittingly make it so. There never was a time when our economy was less dependent on the US and Europe than it is today. Well over half our exports go to Asia, with surprisingly small proportions going to the US and Europe.

It's true we're quite heavily dependent on China, but its problems are all in the opposite direction to those of the North Atlantic economies: it's growing too strongly and could use a bit of a slowdown. There never was a time when China was less dependent on the US and Europe than it is today. The notion that the world's second-largest economy lives or dies by its exports to the North Atlantic is silly.

But if all this is true, why does our sharemarket still take its lead from Wall Street? Because of its tendency to herd behaviour. By tacit agreement, what Wall Street's done overnight acts as a signal to all Australian players of the direction in which our market will be travelling.

What holds in the short term, however, shouldn't hold forever. Eventually, the price of a BHP Billiton share will reflect the profit-making prospects of BHP - and they're still very good.

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What economists don't know about productivity

Our top econocrats are out banging the drum for more micro-economic reform as the obvious answer to our flagging productivity performance, and civic-minded economics writers are taking up the call. Sorry, but, as the Scots say, I hae me doots.

Economists are trained to believe in the need for ''more micro reform''. They'd want it even if our productivity performance was fine. You get the feeling the physician is prescribing his favourite medicine without bothering to think much about the patent's symptoms.

Assuming you accept their premise that maximising economic growth is the sole object of the human exercise, the economists are right in their incessant quoting of Paul Krugman's line that ''productivity isn't everything, but in the long run it's almost everything''.

For the past 200 years, since the early days of the Industrial Revolution, the material living standards of people in the West have been rising almost continuously, thanks to continuing improvement in the productivity of labour and capital.

Have we had 200 years of continuing micro-economic reform to bring that improvement about? Of course not. So there has to be something seriously wrong with an economy that can't achieve a satisfactory rate of productivity improvement without regular injections of reform.

Like most other things in the economy, micro reform is subject to diminishing marginal returns. And when we run out of things to reform, what do we do then? A counsel of perfection isn't a lot of use.

We need to remind ourselves that governments don't actually run the economy, business people do. So if businesses aren't generating much productivity improvement, the obvious place to look is at the behaviour of business people.

But economists aren't trained to think that way. Thanks to conventional economics' foundation assumption that economic actors are always and everywhere rational - an assumption many economists claim not to really believe but which undergirds far more of what they do believe than they realise - their ideology holds that, as a general rule to which there are only limited exceptions, markets get it right.

It follows that, if the market isn't delivering satisfactory outcomes, it could be a case of ''market failure'', but it's much more likely to be a case of ''government failure''. It must be something the government's doing that's stuffing things up. Thus does every problem in the private sector become the government's fault.

This is almost the complete rationale for micro-economic reform. If you eliminate, reduce or reform government intervention in markets, thereby increasing the intensity of competition in those markets, everything will work much better. (The only major exception to the rule is tighter regulation of competition so as to counter business's natural tendency to gather and exploit monopoly pricing power.)

Though few economists seem to have noticed, our experience with micro reform in the 1980s and early '90s was surprisingly disappointing.

Under the Hawke-Keating government (and the Greiner and Kennett governments) we threw everything at it: floating the dollar, deregulating the financial system, phasing out border protection, reforming taxation, privatising a host of government-owned businesses, deregulating more individual industries than one person could remember and decentralising wage-fixing.

We gathered every bit of low-hanging fruit we could grab, and what did we achieve? A vastly improved productivity performance in the second half of the '90s - which lasted a measly five years before disappearing without trace.

We achieved a big lift in our level of productivity, but we failed to achieve what we should have achieved if micro reform was the true answer to the productivity problem: lift-off. That is, a lasting increase in our rate of productivity improvement.

In the time since then we've backslidden on little of that reform (here I don't class deciding not to denude individual workers of most of their bargaining power as a sin). Nor have we introduced much in the way of anti-competitive measures since then.

So micro reform has proved of limited potency in the search for productivity and, in any case, we've already used most of our ammunition. It's not by chance that we've had so little further reform since Paul Keating's day.

If you examine the long-term record on productivity improvement, you find most of it comes from technological advance (and much of that advance works its magic by pursuing further economies of scale - a factor that works to reduce competition, not increase it).

But if economists are so committed to productivity improvement, how much do they know about the conditions that foster technological advance? Surprisingly little. How much research effort have they put into furthering their understanding of it? Amazingly little.

Their workhorse model merely assumes tech advance is ''exogenous'' - it comes from outside the economic system, dropping from heaven like manna. That assumption is both wrong and unhelpful. Yet their attempt to understand how tech change is produced within the system - ''new growth theory'' - has been allowed to wither on the vine.

The best advice economists have to offer policymakers on promoting tech advance is a version of ''build it and they will come'': get your monetary incentives right (that is, cut the top tax rate) and sit back and wait.

Other disciplines are busy trying to unravel the mysteries of ''innovation'' and what conditions foster it. They could benefit from collaboration with rigorous-thinking economists, but it's all too touchy-feely for most economists.

Judged by their ''revealed preference'' - what they do, not what they say - economists don't have much genuine interest in productivity. They have a pet solution that does no lasting good, and if you're not prepared to swallow their nasty medicine - which no prime minister or premier since Keating's era has been - that's a sign of your lamentable moral weakness.

If our materialism-promoting politicians had any sense, they'd look elsewhere for answers.

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Are we talking ourselves into a recession?

Is it possible for a country that is the envy of the developed world to talk itself into recession? I don't know. But it seems we're about to find out. It won't be easy, of course. It's a question of whether our increasingly negative perceptions can overwhelm the reality that our economy has a mighty lot going for it. Let's start with reality, then move to perceptions.

The Europeans, and now the Americans, are rightly worried about their yawning budget deficits and huge levels of government debt. Their problem is, the more they do to reduce deficits the more they weaken their economies, at a time when they're already pretty weak. By contrast, our budget deficit isn't particularly big and our level of government debt is laughably small.

Part of their problem is the money they spent bailing out their banks - many of which still aren't back in full working order. By contrast, we've had no problem with our banks.

Despite their weak economies, the Europeans and Americans have been worried about the rising cost of rural and mineral raw materials. But what's a problem for them is income for us. The prices we're getting for our exports have rarely been higher.

As a consequence of this boom, the mining companies are spending mind-boggling amounts building mines and natural gas facilities. Were we in our right minds we'd have no trouble accepting that, since you and I live in the same economy as the miners, a lot of this income and spending rubs off on us. Instead, the incessant talk about the alleged "two-speed economy" has allowed us to imagine that, while the miners are doing well, the rest of us are stuffed. Retail sales are flat? See, I told you I was doing it tough.

Trouble is, there's little hard evidence to support this impression. Unemployment in the North Atlantic economies is about 9 per cent; here it's below 5 per cent. And this holds around the country. Using trend figures, it ranges from 4.2 per cent in Western Australia to 5.6 per cent in Tasmania, with 5.1 per cent in sorry-for-itself NSW and 4.7 per cent in Victoria. Nationally, employment grew by 2 per cent over the year to June, with WA and NSW right on the average, resource-poor Victoria topping the comp with 3.1 per cent and resource-rich Queensland achieving just 1.1 per cent. Pay rises are few and far between in the US and Europe but in poor little Oz the wage price index rose by a too-generous 4 per cent over the year to March. Again, the growth was remarkably similar around the country. Wages in WA grew by 4.1 per cent and in Tassie by 3.5 per cent. NSW and Victoria were right on the national average.

Admittedly, mining wages grew by 4.6 per cent, but workers in the (genuinely) hard-pressed manufacturing sector got 4.1 per cent and even in retailing workers averaged rises of 3.3 per cent.

Conduct a focus group and punters will tell you they're suffering mightily under the rapidly rising cost of living - which is why politicians on both sides are always encouraging the punters to feel sorry for themselves.

But when you combine healthy growth in employment with too-high wage rises you get household incomes growing faster than consumer prices. So if retail sales are weak, it's not because we can't afford to spend, it's because we choose not to - whether out of prudence or fear for the future.

There's no doubt the retailers - along with manufacturing and tourism - are doing it tough. But there's nothing in the capitalist contract that guarantees businesses an easy life. And, as an indicator of the overall health of the economy, the weakness in retail sales is misleading.

Did you (or any of the journalists carrying on this week) know retail sales account for only about 40 per cent of consumer spending? They cover mainly goods bought in shops, particularly department stores. They don't include sales of cars, nor the growing proportion of our incomes we spend on services.

New car sales have been weak in recent months, partly because of the lack of supply from Japan since the tsunami, but (though no one thought it worth telling you) this week we learnt car sales jumped by 12 per cent in July.

And that's not the only sign we're more willing to spend than many imagine. This week we also learnt that plenty of people are spending big on overseas travel. Short-term departures of Australian residents rose by 1.4 per cent in June to be up almost 11 per cent on a year earlier.

In real terms, retail sales grew by 0.3 per cent in the June quarter and just 0.5 per cent over the year to June. But total consumer spending is expected to grow by 0.5 per cent in the quarter and 2.5 per cent over the year. That's not brilliant, but it's a far cry from death's door.

So if the underlying reality of the economy is enviably good, why are we so dissatisfied and anxious? Why are we so ready to think the worst about the prospects in America and Europe and to conclude - contrary to all the evidence - that tough times for them spell tough times for us? Well, not because the media are revelling in the bad news and forgetting to mention the good. They always do that. It's just that, when we're in an optimistic frame of mind we ignore the gloom mongering, whereas when we're in a pessimistic mood we lap it up.

Alternating waves of optimism and pessimism - "animal spirits" - do much more to explain the swings in the business cycle than it suits most economists to admit. And because we're such herd animals, we tend to contract these moods from one another - even from our cousins on the other side of the globe.

Will our increasingly negative perceptions overwhelm our strong reality? If they do, they'll have a fight on their hands: thanks to the mining construction boom, business investment spending is expected to grow by 15 per cent this year and another 15 per cent next year. For your own sake, pray reality wins.


AUSTRALIAN ASX 200

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Net benefits at $50 billion and climbing

Like many major new technologies before it, the internet is steadily remaking a host of our industries - music, film, travel agencies, banking, newspapers, bookselling and now retailing more generally. You've heard a lot about the pain this is inflicting on businesses and their staff, and you'll hear a lot more.

But while we're being asked to feel bad about all the business people and workers displaced, there are two things we shouldn't lose sight of. New technology is always reshaping our economy; it's the price we pay for 200 years of ever-rising affluence. And the costs to the producers of the old technology are always outweighed by the benefits to the users of the new technology.

Today Google Australia is releasing a study by Deloitte Access Economics which attempts to measure those benefits. It finds about 190,000 people are employed in occupations directly related to the internet, with its direct contribution to the Australian economy worth about $50 billion a year, or 3.6 per cent of gross domestic product.

But the internet's wider benefits, only partly captured in GDP, include about $27 billion a year in productivity increases to businesses and governments and benefits worth about $53 billion a year to households: a more efficient way to search for information; a greater variety of items for purchase; greater convenience and a new source of recreation.

Internet browsers and search engines allow consumers to quickly and easily find information on anything from products and services, academic papers, the availability of jobs or houses to simply obtain directions or the latest on the weather.

One study finds it takes an average of seven minutes to search for a particular item online, compared to 22 minutes for an offline search. Assuming a person asks one answerable question every two days, and that workers value their time at the average after-tax wage of $22 an hour, this yields a saving worth $1.40 a day or $500 a year. Multiplying that by all internet users we get $7 billion a year.

Many markets are dominated by a small number of best-selling products. But the internet's search capacity makes it easier to find a wide range of niche products, which a study shows is reducing the market share of the big sellers. In 2000, an online store such as Amazon had about 23 million titles available, compared to 100,000 in the largest bricks-and-mortar bookshops.

In the old days you could spend a lifetime rummaging through second-hand bookshops searching for a particular out-of-print title. These days you can find it in a trice on the internet (and sometimes they'll print up a new copy just for you).

Specialised price and product comparison sites - such as Webjet, Wotif and Booko - compare prices from across the internet. And here's the trick: this doesn't just allow you to find the best price with ease, the heightened competition - and heightened emphasis on price - encourages businesses to lower their prices.

In the old days, hotels and motels charged people who walked in off the street a ''rack rate'' much higher than they charged people who came via travel agents or their employer. These days, competition often forces them to ensure the price they list on their site is their best price (a truth I learnt the hard way).

Even so, a study finds that the increase in variety provided by the internet is of greater value to consumers than the decline in prices. Assuming 40 per cent of all goods and services bought online wouldn't be readily available in the absence of the internet (as is the case for books), the increase in consumer welfare across all online retailing activities would be worth about $16 billion a year.

Now convenience. Before the widespread availability of the internet, most banking transactions involved a physical trip during opening hours and waiting in line to be served. Likewise, registering a car involved a trip to the motor registry, paying bills and submitting a tax return involved buying an envelope and a stamp, filling out the form and dropping it at the nearest post box.

For the majority of the working-age population, the ability to perform these tasks and more online saves a substantial amount of time each week. Assuming it saves a typical internet user half an hour a week, its estimated value to consumers is $8 billion a year.

I'm always using it to pay parking fines and my kids use it to fill out their tax returns (where the taxman helpfully ''pre-fills'' the return with information about your income he already knows). The latest is you can fill out next week's census form online. As for banking, I darken the doors of my bank branch only a few times a year.

On average, Australians spend 1.5 hours of leisure time a day online. If half this time is spent on recreational activities such as using social media, email and browsing, the annual value of this ''consumer surplus'' is about $1600 per person which, with a few additions, multiplies to a national benefit of $22 billion a year.

When you remember not all households and businesses are yet on the internet, that use of the net will broaden and deepen with the rollout of the national broadband network, and that we're just scratching the surface of the uses to which it could be put, its ability both to disrupt industries and to benefit consumers has a lot further to go.

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Baby boomers' wealth effect hits the retailers

Back in the early Noughties, when the property market was booming, a lot of baby boomers began contemplating their future and realised they hadn't saved nearly enough to allow them to continue in retirement the privileged lives they'd always enjoyed. They decided they'd have to start saving big time.

So what did they do? Went out and bought a negatively geared investment property, of course. Their notion of saving was to borrow to the hilt, then sit back and wait for the lightly taxed capital gains to roll in.

If you're wondering why the retailers are doing it tough at present, don't blame it all on the mug punters' conviction that Armageddon starts next July 1 with the carbon tax. Part of the explanation rests with the baby boomers learning the hard way that saving actually requires discipline.

Glenn Stevens, governor of the Reserve Bank, has reminded us of the way real consumer spending per person grew significantly faster than household disposable income for the decade to 2005. Over the period our rate of household saving steadily declined until we were actually dis-saving.

And this from a nation that hitherto had saved quite a high proportion of income. Why the change? Well, Stevens is no doubt right to explain it primarily in terms of our return to low inflation and low nominal interest rates, combined with a deregulated banking system now more than eager to lend for housing.

But there has to be more to it. For most of the decade in question we fought each other for the best house in the block, forcing house prices up and up. At much the same time, the sharemarket was rising strongly as we and the rest of the developed world enjoyed the last phase of the over-confident Great Moderation that ended so abruptly with the coming of the global financial crisis.

Over the 35 years to 1995, the nation's real private wealth per person grew at the rate of 2.6 per cent a year, pretty much in line with the growth in real gross domestic product per person.

Over 10 years to 2005, however, real household financial assets (including our superannuation and direct shareholdings) grew by 5.3 per cent a year per person. The corresponding growth in non-financial assets (most of which is the value of our homes) was 7.5 per cent.

Put the two together and our total assets grew by 6.7 per cent a year. (Our debts grew, too, of course. The ratio of debt to total assets rose from 11 per cent in 1995 to 17.5 per cent in 2005.)

So what was it that gave us the confidence during this period to let our consumer spending rip and stop saving any of our household income? One almighty ''wealth effect''. Capital gain was king.

Everywhere we turned we could see ourselves getting wealthier, year after year. The value of our homes rising inexorably, the value of our super swelling nicely. With all that going for us, who needed to save the old-fashioned way? No wonder negative gearing - of share portfolios as well as residential property - was so popular.

As Stevens says, that period of debt-fuelled wealth accumulation had to end sometime. We would come to terms with the new world of lower nominal interest rates and readily available credit, loading ourselves up with as much debt as we needed (or a bit more) and calling it a day.

The recovery in household saving began well before the global financial crisis. Even so, there's no reason to doubt the crisis did much to accelerate our return to rates of household saving - 11.5 per cent at last count - not seen since the 1980s. For one thing, it reversed the wealth effect.

In principle, the behaviour of people of all ages should be affected by the knowledge of what's happening to the market value of their wealth. In practice, however, you'd expect it to have the greatest effect on those approaching retirement - the baby boomers - or even the already retired.

Consider it from their perspective. In the months leading up to and during the global financial crisis of late 2008, they observed it smash the sharemarket and take a huge bite out of their super savings. The market has recovered a fair bit since then but it hasn't regained its earlier peak and could hardly be said to be booming.

As for house prices, the boom is long gone and prices are, in market parlance, ''flat to down''. There's no reason to believe they'll be taking off again any time soon.

Many boomers have responded to this marked change in their prospects by postponing their retirement. A government-funded survey regularly asks workers over 45 when they expect to retire. In 2009, almost 60 per cent were expecting to retire at 65 or later, up from 50 per cent two years earlier.

With little prospect of much in the way of capital gains, it's a safe bet the baby boomers are leading the way in the nation's return to a higher rate of saving.

But that doesn't spell the death of retailing. As a matter of arithmetic, it's only when households are increasing their rate of saving - as they are now - that consumer spending has to grow very much more slowly than household income is growing.

Once households have reached a rate of saving they're happy with - no matter how high that rate - consumption can resume growing at the same rate as income.

But who knows? It may not be until the second half of next year that the punters - including the baby boomers - realise how much Tony Abbott & Co conned them about the depredations of the carbon tax.

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Putting away dollars makes sense once again

Our top econocrats make a lot more speeches these days, but sometimes they say things that represent a clear advance in our understanding of what's happening with that mysterious animal we call the economy. Glenn Stevens, governor of the Reserve Bank, gave such a speech this week.

One device economists use to get a handle on economic developments is to distinguish between those that are ''cyclical'' and those that are ''structural''. Cyclical developments are a product of the economy's present position in its eternal movement through the business cycle of boom and bust. That is, they may be important now, but they won't last.

Structural developments, by contrast, come from deeper, underlying and long-running economic and social forces. They usually move more slowly, but they're more permanent.

The main message the econocrats have been trying to get to us is that the present resources boom isn't just another short-lived commodity boom but is bringing about a long-lasting change in the structure of our economy.

But this week Stevens identified a quite different structural change occurring at the same time as the mining construction boom. We're in the middle of a profound shift in the attitudes of Australian households towards how much of their income they spend on consumption and how much they save.

For many years households used to save a high proportion of their disposable incomes: 10, 12 even 15 per cent. Taking all households together, their mortgage and other debt stood at less than 50 per cent of annual household disposable income. Everyone's ambition was to pay off their mortgage as early as possible.

But, as Stevens points out, all that started to change in the mid-1990s. Over the 10 years to 2005, the trend rate of growth in real household disposable income (here, meaning income after tax and net interest payments) was 2 per cent a year per person. That's a very healthy rate of income growth - more than double the rate seen in the previous two decades.

Even so, household consumption spending grew over the same period at the even faster real, per-person rate of 2.8 per cent a year. How can our spending grow at a faster rate than our income? By us steadily cutting the rate of our saving.

We even got to the point where our consumption spending exceeded our income. How is that possible? By ''dissaving'' - running down past savings or by borrowing.

But from about 2005, before the global financial crisis in late 2008, all that began changing.

Over the five years to the end of 2010, real household disposable income per person grew at the even faster rate of 2.9 per cent. Why? Because of the flow through the economy of the very much higher export prices we've been getting.

But here's the thing: as our rate of income growth has accelerated, our rate of consumer spending has slowed down. In per-person terms, real consumption today is no higher than it was three years ago.

So what's changed? We've stopped saving less and started saving more. Why? Well, it's obviously not primarily because we're worried about higher interest rates, the risk of problems in Europe and America causing another global financial crisis or we're all afraid the world will end when the carbon tax starts next July.

Those worries are clearly part of the present, short-term, cyclical explanation for our caution as consumers, but they can't explain a structural trend that began about six years ago.

For that you have to look deeper. As we've seen, it's possible for your spending to grow faster than your income for a protracted period as you run down past savings and borrow. But you can't keep doing it forever. Eventually, your debts get so great that you (or your bankers) call a halt.

You realise having so much debt is dangerous, so you hold back your spending and increase your saving - often by paying off some of the debt. The ratio of household debt to annual disposable income shot up to about 150 per cent, but in the past few years it's levelled off.

The point to realise is that this new trend represents a return to normal behaviour after a protracted period of abnormal behaviour. We used to save 10 or 12 per cent of our incomes, and now we've got back to saving that much. We used to want to pay off our mortgage ASAP, and now we're back to wanting that to.

What happened in the middle was households making a protracted but essentially once-only adjustment to two major developments: financial deregulation, which made banks much keener to lend to households using newer, more flexible deals, and the return to low inflation and low nominal interest rates, which allowed people to borrow a lot more for the same monthly payments.

With hindsight it's clear we'd long wanted to spend more on better housing so, when the opportunity arose, we did. In the process of everyone wanting to move to a better house at pretty much the same time, however, we greatly bid up the price of houses and acquired a lot of debt.

But now we've adjusted to the new world of lower interest rates and higher levels of debt. We're not getting in any deeper, so have moved back to more normal levels of saving.

While we were watching the value of our homes going up and up we felt richer and so didn't feel we needed to save from our incomes. We stepped up our consumption. But now house prices have levelled off and so we've held back our consumption and returned to saving for the future the normal way.

Point is, the period of consumption spending growing faster than income has ended and is unlikely to return. At present, our efforts to increase our rate of saving mean consumption is growing a lot more slowly than our income is growing.

But as soon as we get our rate of saving back to where we want it to be, we can maintain that rate while consumer spending returns to growing at the same speed as income. With the saving rate already back to 11 per cent, you'd think we must be pretty close to reaching that point. If so, consumer spending could resume a reasonable rate of growth once our present short-term worries lift.

Message for retailers: the party times will never return, but the present tough times won't last.

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Crime has become a mind game

The older I get, the more I realise how complicated - even mysterious - the world is. When I was young I tried to keep everything straightforward, concrete and logical. Then I realised the direct effects of some action can sometimes be overshadowed by its indirect effects.

Accountants and economists, as you've no doubt realised, tend to evaluate things in monetary terms. And there's no denying money is important - even to those who profess to have a soul above it.

But when you boil it down, money is important because of its power to affect how we feel. And not everything we feel can be converted to monetary terms. Unfortunately, our tendency to focus on the concrete and easily measured means we often neglect things that, while intangible, are important to our well-being.

Fortunately, economists are coming to realise this. Take crime. Why do we worry so much about it? Well, it does lead to monetary loss, including all the expense we run to as individuals and a community to protect ourselves from loss. And crime can lead to physical injury too, of course.

As a community, we - and our media - devote a lot more attention to crime than we used to. As part of this there's a lot more concern for the welfare of the victims of crime. We're more inclined to agree they should be compensated and we listen sympathetically as they take to the airwaves demanding vengeance against the perpetrators.

But has it occurred to you that the suffering of the wider community may exceed that of the victims? Or that crime's greatest cost may be to our mental well-being rather than our physical health or our pocketbooks?

By the standards of developed countries, crime rates in Australia are high. In a survey conducted in 2000, a higher share of Australians reported being the victim of a crime in the previous year than in any of the other 16 countries, including the US. By the same token, the level of crime in Australia, particularly property crime, fell quite considerably during the first half of the noughties - a fact that hasn't received as much publicity as our concern about crime would lead you to expect.

Francesca Cornaglia, of the centre for economic performance at the London School of Economics, and Andrew Leigh, formerly a professor of economics at the Australian National University and now a Labor member of federal parliament, have used local data to examine the link between crime and mental well-being in Australia.

They find that victims of property crime (burglary and theft) tend to be slightly better educated, whereas victims of violent crimes (homicide, assault, sexual assault, abduction and robbery) are less well educated.

Being a victim of crime, particularly violent crime, is "strongly and significantly related" to experiencing a deterioration in mental well-being. Victims' social functioning is harmed as emotional problems interfere with normal social activities. And they have difficulties with daily personal activities because of emotional problems.

Victims who are already suffering from mental distress are likely to react more strongly to crime than other people do. And victims are more likely to live in areas with higher crime rates. Victims of violence are particularly likely to experience post traumatic stress disorder, depression, panic and substance abuse. But Cornaglia and Leigh find that the rest of us also suffer a decrease in our mental well-being as a result of an increase in violent crime. The effect on our social functioning is nearly half the effect experienced by the actual victims.

Among all the violent crimes, it's assault, sexual assault and robbery that affect most categories of mental well-being. Although sexual assaults constitute a fairly small proportion of all crime, they have a "sizeable and significant effect" on three of the five components of mental well-being.

So the study finds strong evidence that the costs of crime are mental as well as physical and monetary. It also finds that the cost of violent crime in reducing our mental well-being extends well beyond the victims to the whole of the community.

But when you turn from the victims to the rest of us you turn from the reality to the perception, from the actual experience of crime to the fear of experiencing it. The degree of fear we feel about being a victim of crime can be out of proportion to the statistical risk of us actually becoming a victim.

This means that if media coverage of crime heightens our fear of being a victim beyond the actual risk of it, the media is adding unnecessarily to the decline in our mental well-being. Cornaglia and Leigh find the intensity of media reporting does increase the negative effect on mental well-being.

The media have "turned to crime" in recent decades in their pursuit of commercial advantage and in the no-doubt-correct belief that crime reporting is something their audience wants more of.

But the tabloid press in Britain is discovering the same people who lap up intimate details of the private lives of celebrities, politicians and even crime victims can turn on you when faced with the knowledge of the lengths to which you went to bring them those details.

If feeding the public's fascination with crime - and, in the process, leaving it with an exaggerated perception of the chances of becoming a victim - reduces the public's mental well-being, a day may come when "but that's what you wanted" won't be judged a sufficient excuse.

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Don't wish a fall in interest rates on us

So you like the sound of a cut in interest rates? Don't get your hopes up. It's possible, but not probable. And remember, rates go down only when times get tougher. Is that what you want?

Though the likelihood is that hysteria over the imminent devastation to be wrought by the carbon tax accounts for the greatest part of the present caution among consumers, vague anxiety over the incomprehensible goings on in Greece is probably also contributing.

I don't believe in troubling trouble until trouble troubles me - especially when there's nothing you can do about it. But it seems I'm in a minority. Scare yourself over some event that with any luck won't happen? Yeah, why not? Got to get some excitement in your life.

The surest way for us to get a cut in interest rates would be for some major disaster in Europe - say, a disorderly debt default by Greece that caused the flighty financial markets to spread contagion to other highly indebted members of the euro area - to bring about another global financial crisis.

Should it happen, it would be similar to what we experienced after the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008, with one exception: the financial markets are less likely to freeze up the way they did then. This time, no bank, central bank or government could say they had no inkling it was coming - which is what reduces the likelihood of a disaster being allowed to happen.

What we would get is the same wave of fear and uncertainty among consumers and businesses sweeping instantaneously around the world to every country that has television news - even those with little direct connection to the debt problems, including China (as happened last time) and us (ditto). We wouldn't be human if we didn't act like sheep.

We now know what happens when consumers and businesses around the globe become uncertain about the future and so suspend any plans they may have had for new spending until the outlook becomes clearer: international trade plummets, industrial production dives and world commodity prices crash.

The first time that happened it didn't take the Reserve Bank long to figure out what it needed to do: slash interest rates. It cut the official interest rate by 4 percentage points in five months. It would take it even less time to come to a similar conclusion this time.

If you could enjoy some such huge cut in your mortgage rate while being completely sure you and yours would keep their jobs, what a wonderful world this would be for those schooled by politicians and the media to take an utterly self-centred view of the economy. Trouble is, with everyone around you panicking, you couldn't be at all sure of keeping your job.

But let's step back from the worst-case scenario to something more probable. The truth is that despite all the self-pitying, over-hyped gloom, the Reserve retains a ''bias to tighten'' - its expectation that sooner or later it will need to raise interest rates, not cut them.

Why? Because we're in the middle of the biggest commodity boom, and the early stages of the biggest mining construction boom, we've experienced in 140 years. And because it's delusional to imagine all the benefit from that boom is penned up in Western Australia.

To be more specific, it's because the Reserve's first responsibility is to keep inflation in check and inflation is showing signs of breaking out. In particular, wages are growing at the relatively fast rate of 4 per cent.

Were labour productivity improving at the 2 per cent or even 1.5 per cent rate we've enjoyed in the past, that would be nothing to worry about. But productivity improvement has been particularly limited for some years, meaning ''unit labour costs'' (the average cost of labour per unit of production) are rising at a rate that will add to employers' price pressure.

How do you slow down wages growth? By using an increase in interest rates to slow the growth in borrowing and spending - demand - and, hence, the derived demand for labour.

All this says the Reserve will be scrutinising the consumer price index figures we get on Wednesday with particular concern.

It's true, however, that significant parts of the economy are doing it tough at present. Some of this is the unavoidable and actually helpful consequence of the resources boom's effect on the dollar, but in the case of retailing it's a self-inflicted bout of caution.

So, despite its worries about inflation, the Reserve will be reluctant to raise interest rates while the weakness in retail sales and other parts of the economy raise a question about the ongoing strength of demand. If underlying inflation in the June quarter comes in at about 0.7 per cent, it will be happy to stay its hand and await a clearer picture. Were the underlying increase to be as high as 1 per cent, it would probably still avoid raising rates at its board meeting the following Tuesday, but would be most uncomfortable about it.

When will it raise rates? When it sees signs consumers are losing their caution, or if the unemployment rate were to keep falling.

But what would prompt it to cut rates in the absence of global catastrophe? A lower than expected rise in underlying inflation next week plus, over the next few months, continuing consumer caution leading to further weakness in economic activity and a significant rise in unemployment.

You may wish for a rise in joblessness to bring about a cut in your mortgage rate, but that would be selfish and quite possibly foolhardy.

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Keynesian economists keen on Gillard's way

They say if you laid all the economists in the world end to end, they still wouldn't reach a conclusion. In truth, though they do tend to be an argumentative lot, there's a fair bit of agreement between them - as you can see from the Economic Society of Australia's latest survey of its members' opinions.

Much of the agreement is on things you'd expect but there are a few surprises. If you judged professional economists' views by the articles you see them writing in the press, you'd conclude most were pretty libertarian, opposed to high taxation and government spending and suspicious of governments.

But the survey reveals them to be still quite Keynesian in their attitude towards managing the macro economy and quite willing to support government intervention in the economy to correct instances of market failure.

The survey also reveals their views to be more consistent with the policies of the federal Labor government than those espoused by the opposition. Almost three-quarters of respondents support the levying of a national tax on the excess profits of the mining industry, for instance. And 79 per cent believe "price-based mechanisms" rather than direct regulation are the more appropriate way to cut greenhouse gas emissions.

But price-based mechanisms could include the subsidies that are part of Tony Abbott's direct action plan. So a different question was asked of just those people attending the first session of the annual conference of economists last week.

This showed 59 per cent agreeing Julia Gillard's carbon tax package was "good economic policy," with 26 per cent disagreeing. By contrast, only 11 per cent agreed Abbott's direct action approach was good policy, with 62 per cent disagreeing.

Returning to the main survey, it had more than 570 respondents, 86 per cent of whom hold at least a bachelor degree with honours. More than 37 per cent have PhDs. Of those employed, 37 per cent are academics, 34 per cent work elsewhere in the public sector and 26 per cent in the private sector.

If you want agreement, try this: 85 per cent agree that an independent cost-benefit analysis should be published before any major public infrastructure project is approved. Almost three-quarters support congestion pricing of road use, indexation of the income-tax scale and abolition of the first home buyers grant (which harms rather than helps first home buyers by raising house prices).

More than 70 per cent want to abolish the baby bonus, 65 per cent the stamp duty on the conveyancing of homes and 64 per cent want increased skilled migration.

About 60 per cent oppose continuation of the government guarantee of bank deposits, support unilateral reduction of industry protection and believe there is a "natural rate" of unemployment to which the economy tends in the long run.

No surprises there. Now try these. Only 45 per cent are confident lowering the minimum wage would reduce unemployment. Only 42 per cent believe lowering marginal rates of income tax would increase work effort. A narrow majority supports increasing the rate of compulsory superannuation contributions.

About 58 per cent believe restrictions on capital flows into countries would significantly improve the stability and soundness of the global financial system. A third agree large trade deficits are bad for the economy but 38 per cent disagree.

Economists turn out to be great believers in using regulation to reinforce competition. Two-thirds say competition laws should be enforced vigorously to reduce market power from its present level. And three-quarters support the use of jail sentences for executives guilty of price fixing.

Here's a surprise: 62 per cent disagree with the contention that consumer protection laws reduce economic efficiency. Almost two-thirds oppose suggestions that Australia reduce its spending on overseas aid. And almost three-quarters say governments should provide greater economic incentives to improve people's diet.

If you think that makes them sound terribly politically correct, note this: 60 per cent oppose requiring companies to have a minimum number of women directors. And they narrowly favour basing income tax on family rather than individual income - 41 to 38 per cent - an idea no feminist would accept.

Another sign of lack of political correctness is they're pretty much equally divided on the use of nuclear power in Australia.

Now a question for you: how do you think they divide on whether increasing federal government power relative to the states would increase economic efficiency? Only 32 per cent agree, 35 per cent disagree and 33 per cent "neither agree nor disagree".

Turning to management of the macro economy, more than three-quarters agree a substantial cut in interest rates is an appropriate response to a severe recession. That says they believe governments should attempt to manage the economy through the business cycle. What makes them pretty Keynesian in their approach to macro management is that three-quarters believe a substantial increase in government spending is an appropriate response to a severe recession, while only 43 per cent support a substantial tax cut.

Just less than half believe the Reserve Bank should focus on low inflation rather than on employment or economic growth, with 35 per cent disagreeing. (I'd have been in the neither agree nor disagree category since, in practice, the Reserve focuses on both, as it should.)

What I don't understand is how all this can be true while an amazing 79 per cent believe inflation is caused primarily by growth in the money supply. Huh?

It's also clear economists are stronger supporters of the redistribution of income than you might expect. More than 44 per cent believe the government should adopt policies to make the distribution of income more equal than it is at present.

Two-thirds believe the government should cut middle-class welfare and increase the help given to the disadvantaged.

And they're equally divided on the proposition that the goods and services tax be increased to cover cuts in income tax and company tax.

If you think economists are mindless supporters of the Labor Party - as one leading libertarian has concluded - consider this. Less than a third back abolition of the private health insurance rebate and 46 per cent oppose it.

And they're equally divided on the proposition that all Australians should have access to fast broadband at a uniform wholesale price. Clearly, they're not all the way with Labor's sacred national broadband network.


What Economists Want

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Trust makes the world go around, honestly

What does Britain's phone hacking scandal have in common with its earlier scandal over parliamentary expenses and with the failure of several of its banks during the global financial crisis? As Jonathan Tame, of Britain's Relationships Global, has observed, all three events shake the trust the Brits can have in key institutions of their democracy. The latest scandal raises questions about the trustworthiness of the press, the government and the police.

Sometimes you don't appreciate the importance of things until you're threatened with their loss. Of nothing is that truer than trust.

''Every society is built on trust, and every person needs to be trustworthy,'' Tame says. ''Yet greater integrity is expected from politicians, the police and the media, which is why their failure to meet the public's ethical standards is so distressing.''

Why is trust so important? It's what prevents us from having to do everything ourselves. Trust is believing someone else will act correctly. It enables us to hand our children over to teachers, give our vote to a politician, relax while the pilot flies the plane, put our money in a bank account and share the roads with other motorists.

''We do these things without anxiety because we believe that the others involved share our values, will act responsibly and look after our interests,'' Tame says.

''With any loss of trust, relational capital diminishes. Society becomes poorer as more time is taken drawing up detailed contracts and regulations, more funds are spent on security, surveillance and policing, and health declines because people grow more anxious.''

Mark Scholefield prepared a study on trust for the Relationships Foundation. He says trust allows us to share information and responsibilities for our mutual benefit, while giving us the freedom to get on with our own work and life without worrying too much about the part others play.

''We probably cannot live without some degree of trust,'' Scholefield says. ''Our lives and relationships are too complex to monitor and control completely.''

Trust involves reciprocity. If I trust you, you're more likely to trust me. If you trust me, I'm more likely to live up to that trust. Assume I'm untrustworthy and I'm more likely to conform to your expectations.

But to abuse another's trust is often to end your relationship with them. You can cheat someone with impunity if you're never expecting to see them again. If you're planning to stick around, however, the best strategy is to behave in a trustworthy manner. It's intolerable not to be trusted and equally intolerable not to be able to trust the people around you.

Trust is closely linked to reputation. Whether you're a business, an employee or just a friend, it pays to build a reputation for trustworthiness and reliability. In the modern world we deal with so many people and organisations we don't know that we're often forced to rely on their reputations.

Richard Bronk, of the London School of Economics, has written that trust is crucial to the success of economic relationships such as those between managers and workers or between companies and their suppliers. And honesty is the essential lubricant to a system of exchange.

''If trust and honesty mean anything it is that these individuals will be motivated by them to suspend the continual quest for personal advantage in certain key situations,'' Bronk says.

If ever there was a case where the quest for personal, commercial and party advantage is damaging our trust in politicians and the media it's the unending brawling over the carbon tax.

It seems the public's trust in Julia Gillard will forever be tainted by the manner in which she came to power. She's not the first or the last politician to break a promise - in this case her promise not to introduce a carbon tax during the present term - but her failure to apologise and adequately explain her reasons for doing so is undoubtedly compounding the loss of trust in her.

Nor will it be helped by her use of taxpayers' money to pay for an advertising campaign to sell the carbon tax before it has become law. In opposition, Labor bitterly attacked the Howard government's abuse of public funds for such purposes; now it's doing the same. In the heat of battle, the possibility of short-term benefit outweighs the risk to the reputation of politicians in general and Labor in particular.

Scare campaigns - where politicians prey on the fears of insecure and ill-informed voters by greatly exaggerating the likely consequences of the other side's policies - are accepted by both sides of politics and the media as a legitimate tactic.

It's always a lot harder to explain a complex policy than it is to put the frighteners on the punters but Tony Abbott's gross misrepresentation of the carbon tax's effect on prices, employment and whole industries exceeds all records in effectiveness and dishonesty.

I would never have believed one politician could, by all his reckless claims, stop retail sales in their tracks as frightened punters close their purses in fear for their futures. Why the retailers aren't tearing him apart I don't know.

Do his fellow Liberals and their supporters imagine there will be no backlash when voters eventually realise just how much they were wound up?

But is the media working to help their perplexed customers discern the truth of all the claims and counterclaims? Too many of them are playing the controversy for all it's worth, trumpeting the claims of interest groups that are undocumented and untested. Some are motivated by partisanship, almost all by commercial advantage.

Do they, too, imagine this abuse of the public's trust will go unpunished? What's happening in Britain says otherwise.

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Decarbonising economy is not such a big deal

To a lot of thoughtful people, Julia Gillard's plan to virtually ''decarbonise'' our economy represents one of the most radical attempts at reform in our history.

It will present a profound challenge to the Australian way of life, we're told, requiring changes to our lifestyle, spending patterns, taxation burdens and possibly even people's chosen field of employment.

As well as changing our everyday practices, it will change the structure of the country's fiscal and industrial systems and the way we trade with the rest of the world.

Fortunately, however, the adjustment needed to achieve a low-carbon economy won't be nearly as drastic as the thoughtful observers expect.

The first point is that the very reason economists advocate the use of the price mechanism is their confidence this will be the least-cost way to bring about the desired changes. Least-cost primarily refers to least reduction in the rate of improvement in our material standard of living (which reduction Treasury's modelling estimates to be less than 0.1 percentage points

a year, totalling about 0.5 per cent by 2020).

Something that has such a modest effect on our standard of living is unlikely to have much effect on our way of life. If it doesn't, that will be by design.

Decarbonising the economy isn't as radical as it sounds. It's not too much of an oversimplification to say the main change we need to achieve is just in the means we use to generate electricity.

It's not likely to involve any reduction in our use of electricity, nor much reduction in the rate of growth in that use. That's true despite all the talk about the higher price of electricity encouraging householders and businesses to use it less wastefully. By definition, wasting electricity contributes nothing to our standard of living.

The majority of the economy will be largely unaffected by carbon pricing. Get this: Treasury estimates that industries employing more than 90 per cent of the workforce account for less than 10 per cent of emissions.

Note, too, that Treasury expects about half the eventual reduction in emissions achieved by our big polluting industries to be brought about in other countries, where reducing emissions is cheaper. This, too, is a design feature intended to minimise the cost and disruption to our economy.

Remember that the decarbonising of the economy won't happen overnight. It will be brought about over the next 40 years. And much of it will happen relatively smoothly as electricity producers install emissions-efficient generators when their old power stations come to the end of their useful lives.

This is why it's so important to leave those producers in no doubt that the cost of emissions will be high and rising. Paradoxically, the more they believe that, the more their actions will cause it to be less true.

Tony Abbott claims the scheme obviously involves the end of the coal industry because Treasury's projections envisage coal accounting for less than 10 per cent of electricity production in 2050.

This is dishonest for several reasons. It ignores the 15 per cent of production expected to come from coal that's been subject to carbon capture and storage. More significantly, it ignores the high proportion of coal produced for export, including coking coal for steel-making. (And this guy calls Gillard a liar.)

Decarbonisation should also involve a major reduction in our use of fossil fuels for transport, of course. But, if the world price of oil keeps rising, over time that change will come about regardless of Gillard's carbon pricing.

The assertion that decarbonisation will bring marked and disturbing changes in our way of life reveals a lack of appreciation of how much things are always changing - especially over a period as long as 40 years.

Our spending patterns change over the years as we buy proportionately fewer goods and more services, as new electronic gismos are invented, as more women leave the home to work and as enterprising businesses dream up new services to sell us. Do we notice? Not really.

It's funny to have some critics asking why they're levying a new tax then giving back most of the proceeds (including by reductions in income tax) and then have others talking about significant changes in the tax burden and the fiscal structure.

The beauty of taxes that are used to change the relative prices people and businesses face is that you can then use the proceeds to reduce other, ideally more inefficient, taxes. This, too, is a design feature.

John Howard used the surge in company tax revenue associated with the resources boom to cut personal income tax five years in a row then proposed increasing it to eight years (with the Rudd government obliging). This significant change in the mix of taxes was brought about without anyone much noticing.

It's true the carbon price will cause employment in the small proportion of the economy that's emissions-intensive to grow less quickly than otherwise, while employment in the small proportion of the economy producing renewable energy grows more quickly than otherwise.

While ever the overall economy is growing, such modest changes in employment shares won't cause much angst. And get this: each year about 2 million people change jobs, including about 500,000 who change industries.

The structural change the carbon price will bring isn't likely to be all that history-making. According to Treasury, ''the changes to the Australian economy from pricing carbon are [projected to be] small by historical standards and small compared to the changes we are already seeing in our economy as it adjusts to accommodate the pressures of mining boom mark II''.

A carbon tax is nothing compared with an exchange rate that stays above parity with the greenback.

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Gillard's flawed scehme worth doing

In this far from perfect world, no reform that makes it into law is ever ideal. It's always flawed and internally inconsistent, a product of the compromise necessitated by our democracy. Of course, some reform attempts are more flawed than others. So the question for Julia Gillard's carbon tax package is: is it too flawed to be worth bothering with?

In this far from perfect world, no reform that makes it into law is ever ideal. It's always flawed and internally inconsistent, a product of the compromise necessitated by our democracy. Of course, some reform attempts are more flawed than others. So the question for Julia Gillard's carbon tax package is: is it too flawed to be worth bothering with?

With Kevin Rudd's carbon pollution reduction scheme in 2009, the compromise was negotiated with the Liberals. But they reneged at the last minute, sacking Malcolm Turnbull and turning to Tony Abbott because so many of them doubted that climate change was real.

The Greens, who were excluded from the negotiations, helped the Coalition vote it down in the Senate, arguing it would do too little to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases and gave too much compensation to the big polluting industries. Knock this one back and they'd have to come up with something better.

With Gillard's package, the compromise has been done with the Greens and the independents. In the meantime, Abbott has had so much success arousing opposition to action on climate change that the continuing supporters of action aren't in a mood to be picky. They'll take what they can get.

But the question remains: is the new package worth all the angst it's causing? And is it much better as a result of the Greens' ministrations?

For starters, it's just a modified version of the Rudd scheme, not radically different. So the ''big polluters'' will still get as much compensation, if not more. But although most economists agree they're getting more compensation than is justified (those competing in export markets against foreign producers not burdened by a carbon tax do need some relief), most economists would also agree the compensation isn't likely to greatly diminish their efforts to reduce emissions.

Non-economists seem to think you can't get people to change their behaviour unless you punish them. Take money from them and they'll change their ways. Economists think the main way to discourage a particular activity is to raise its price relative to the price of other activities. You don't have to take money from them (the ''income effect'' as economists call it) to get them to respond to the changed price structure (the ''substitution effect'').

Most of the compensation will go to the ''emissions-intensive, trade-exposed'' industries, in the form of free emission permits. But each firm's compo will be based on the average emissions of firms in their industry. So those with above-average emissions, which they'll need to cover by buying extra permits, have a clear incentive to find ways to reduce their emissions.

But even those with average or below-average emissions also have an incentive to reduce emissions. Why? Because they'll be able to sell to other firms any of their free permits they don't need.

Thus, just as the Rudd scheme would have done more to discourage emissions than many people imagined, so this package will also discourage emissions.

Gillard's package is widely described as a carbon tax but, strictly speaking, it's an emissions trading scheme in which the price of emission permits is fixed for the first three years and permits made freely available, after which the price is set by auction, with an ever-declining quantity of permits made available each year.

So it's not hugely different from the Rudd scheme, which itself planned to start with a price fixed at $10 a tonne of carbon emissions in the first year. This time the price will start at $23 a tonne, increased in each of the two subsequent years by 2.5 per cent in real terms - an improvement.

The reductions in the trading scheme's cap on emissions - needed to reduce total emissions over time and thus likely to gradually raise the price of permits - will now be set by the government on the basis of recommendations by an independent climate change authority, chaired by a former Reserve Bank governor, Bernie Fraser. An improvement.

Another improvement is that the independent Productivity Commission, no soft touch, will review the levels of assistance provided to trade-exposed industries with a view to reducing them as other countries limit the emissions of their own industries.

The Rudd scheme was widely criticised because its guaranteed reduction in emissions to 5 per cent below 2000 levels by 2020 was considered too small. It's actually more demanding than it sounds because, without action, our emissions would grow a lot between 2000 and 2020. Achieving the 5 per cent target will require emissions in 2020 to be 23 per cent lower that they'd otherwise be.

However, both the old scheme and the new allow for the target reduction to be increased to 15 per cent or 25 per cent of 2000 levels if other countries tighten their own targets. The old scheme aimed to reduce emissions in 2050 to 60 per cent below 2000 levels, whereas the new one aims for 80 per cent below.

Rudd included transport fuels in his scheme while excluding cars and farm vehicles for three years and heavy road vehicles for one year. Gillard's scheme excludes cars and farm vehicles ''forever'' and imposes the equivalent of a carbon price - just 6 cents a litre - on aviation, mining and shipping, extending this to heavy road vehicles after two years.

But nothing is forever in politics and, in any case, does anyone expect the world price of oil to do anything but keep rising?

Gillard's scheme provides substantially more support for innovation, mainly through a $10 billion clean energy finance corporation, which will give a partial subsidy to those firms that win the assistance by proposing better schemes to reduce emissions.

Her scheme also includes (at the behest of an independent, Tony Windsor) a land-sector package worth $1 billion over four years, which will improve biodiversity (the preservation of species) and encourage more eco-friendly farming practices.

Gillard has roundly attacked Abbott's plan for ''direct action'' on climate change rather than ''putting a price on carbon'', but her package also includes direct action - such as buying out the hugely polluting brown coal power stations.

There's nothing wrong with a two-pronged approach in principle, so long as the direct measures aren't too wildly expensive per tonne of carbon avoided or just disguised handouts to rent-seeking industries (as the brown coal buy-out seems to be).

Rudd's flawed scheme was always worth doing; this one is better - just a bit.

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How influential are (economic) journalists?

Australian Conference of Economists, Canberra
Wednesday, July 13, 2011

I take my title, How influential are journalists?, to be a reference to economic journalists, particularly economic commentators. My answer has changed little since a paper I wrote on the topic was published in the Australian Economic Review in 1995: not nearly as influential as you might imagine. But in preparation for defending that view, let me make a few clarifying points.
First, economic journalists distinguish themselves sharply from business (formerly known as financial) journalists. We write about macro and micro issues, they write about the adventures of listed companies.

Second, economic journalists - those who specialise in writing about macro and micro issues, and usually bring some university-level economic training to bear - are relatively rare. There are a few at the ABC (eg Stephen Long), but most work for the quality press.

Third, the economic content in the press can be divided into reporting of news and commentary on that news. News covers such things as ABS statistics, RBA announcements and speeches, speeches by the treasurer and treasury heavies, government reports, the budget and mid-year reviews, and developments in financial markets. Most of that economic reporting is done from the Canberra press gallery. This means that, in practice (and unlike in the US and elsewhere) economic journalism tends to be a specialty within political journalism, making it more focused on political economy issues. Except for the quality press, much economic reporting is done by political reporters - which means, for instance, that if the opposition seems to be making political headway in criticising deficits and debt, the political journalists will take it a lot more seriously and uncritically than economic journalists would. Issues are judged on their political potency, not their economic merits.

Fourth, the role of the news media is much misunderstood by many people. They assume the media’s role is to give their audience a balanced picture of what’s happening in the world beyond people’s personal experience. In fact, because the media is directly or indirectly selling its news, we limit our reporting of what’s happening in the world to those things we believe our audience will find particularly interesting. This imparts considerable biases to what we report: we pay a lot more attention to bad news than good, to problems rather than solutions, and to conflict and controversy (so that, for instance, dissenters from the dominant view on climate change among scientists get a lot more space than their numbers warrant). The media are more interested in people than concepts, and more interested in concrete case studies than abstract principles. In political and economic reporting there is much resort to ‘race-calling’: which side’s doing well in the polls and which isn’t, which leaders are secure and which under threat; which economic indicators are up this month and which are down (or, for the share market and the exchange rate, which are a bit up or a bit down today). The media tend to pander to what they assume to be their audience’s prejudices: so rises in interest rates and the dollar are always good, falls are always bad. Deficits are always bad, surpluses are always good.

So, how influential are economic commentators? Well, not sufficiently influential to discourage their editors from the eternal race-call. They try to discuss indicators in a longer and broader context, but fight an uphill battle. Similarly, they stand against the political journalists’ misconceptions (eg references to the budget deficit as ‘Australia’s deficit’; the notion that the carbon tax package’s funding shortfall of ‘$4 billion over four years’ is a huge discrepancy, or belief that a budget surplus of $1 billion is significantly different from a deficit of $1 billion), but in this they don’t seem to have any impact on the political journalists’ judgements. They don’t have much success in resisting pressure for unending idle speculation about the timing and direction of the next move in the official interest rate.

Economic commentators, in sharp distinction to political commentators, don’t hesitate to take a position in the policy debate and to campaign for particular policies. It’s intended to be a constant and logically consistent position - not one that keeps adjusting so that whatever a government does can be criticised - based on their school of economic thought and personal values, not on partisan loyalties. The bane of an economic commentator’s life is people always trying to consign him or her to a party-political box. In the past most of them have tended to be pretty orthodox in their views - pretty rationalist - but some of us have been trying to offer a wider range of views. The commentators’ paper’s emphasis on race-calling means macroeconomic issues tend to crowd out microeconomic issues, which are often more important. The journalistic profession’s obsession with timeliness - with never being ‘off the pace’ - limits their ability to continue pursuing issues once the political caravan has moved on.

Economic commentators are not great original thinkers. They don’t keep up with the literature. As with most economists, most of the arguments they mount and policy solutions they espouse are pretty derivative. I’ve never deluded myself I’ve been giving the pollies policy advice that was significantly different to and superior to the official advice they were getting. Economic commentators spend a lot of time talking to senior econocrats, and much of what they write echoes the views of the particular econocrats they talk to. They don’t talk to academic economists as much as they probably should, mainly because so few academics keep up with the policy debate. My emphasis has been more on explaining economic policies to my readers than on telling pollies or central bankers how to run the country. And these days I’m trying to offer my readers a critique of economists and economics.

One factor that hugely limits the influence of economic commentators is that all of us read more for reinforcement of our existing views than for enlightenment. We generally avoid reading the opinions of people we know we’ll disagree with, though psychological studies find that, where we do persevere with an article that doesn’t fit with our views, it serves only to confirm the rightness of those views.

I guess that where the economic commentators all sing the same song, a song that’s being sung also by the econocrats and many academics, and we go on doing that for long enough, it is possible to make certain views the conventional wisdom among elite opinion. Of course, my opinion on the extent of our influence is hardly objective, but from my perspective it’s pretty limited.

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Give and take: The new tax is a piece of cake

Years ago, the Keating government had a problem with pensioners wasting taxpayers' money on prescriptions. Knowing their elderly patients got their prescriptions free, doctors were happily issuing ones their patients might or might not end up needing and pensioners were taking them to the chemist and getting them filled, just in case. Many of these often very expensive drugs were not used.

So the government decided to impose a nominal fee on pensioner prescriptions of $2 a pop, just to make people think twice about whether they'd be needed. But, anxious though it was to save big money by reducing the waste of taxpayer-subsidised pharmaceuticals, the government had no desire to leave pensioners out of pocket. It worked out the average number of prescriptions pensioners had filled, multiplied it by $2, and increased pensions by that amount.

I dredge up this story because it may help you understand something about Julia Gillard's planned carbon tax that many people find puzzling.

If Gillard is imposing a carbon tax to raise the price of electricity and gas, with some flow through to the prices of other items, so as to discourage us from using so much fossil fuel, why is she undoing the effect by giving us back most of the tax we'll pay as cuts in income tax and increases in pensions and family benefits?

What's the point of this money-go-round, as Tony Abbott calls it? How can it do any good?

Though the carbon tax will raise about $9 billion a year in revenue, raising revenue is not its primary purpose. Rather, its purpose is to change people's behaviour. And one of the most basic ideas in economics is that the best way to change people's behaviour is to change the prices they face. If there's some activity you wish to discourage, raise its price relative to all the other prices people pay.

When, after a cyclone, the price of bananas shoots up relative to the prices of other fruit, people tend to buy fewer bananas and more apples and oranges. When the price of beef rises more than other meat, people buy less beef and more chicken.

The thinking is that if you raise the price of fossil fuels and emissions-intensive goods relative to the prices of all the other things people buy, they'll change their spending in ways that reduce the use of fossil fuels.

It's not necessary to leave people worse off to get them to change their spending patterns. And since the primary purpose of the carbon tax is to change relative prices rather than to raise revenue, you may as well return the revenue to people by cutting income tax and increasing benefits.

(You can't give back all the revenue because you're using part of it for other purposes, so you favour low- and middle-income households and let higher-income households take it on the chin. Since your calculations about how much the carbon tax will cost people are based on averages, and not everyone fits the average, you give low-income households a bit more than the average so fewer of them are undercompensated.)

Now, you may say finding ways to cut your use of electricity and gas isn't as simple as buying apples rather than bananas, and you'd be right. There are ways to reduce energy use around the house, but I suspect the main way people will respond is by buying a more energy-efficient model the next time they're replacing an appliance.

If you think no amount of energy saving in the home is likely to bring about the degree of reduction in fossil fuel use we needed to achieve, you'd also be right.

People have an automatic tendency to apply government moves such as this to themselves and their homes but, in fact, the relative price change is directed mainly at the big industrial users of electricity and, more particularly, the generators of electricity.

It's when their existing power stations come to the end of their useful lives and are replaced by less-polluting generators that the big steps forward will be made.

The government claims the changes it will make to the income tax scale - lifting the tax-free threshold from $6000 a year to $18,200 - is a major reform, meaning about a million people will no longer have to submit tax returns.

Tony Abbott counters that it's a terrible change: "This is the first time in a generation that marginal tax rates have been increased." The bottom tax rate of 15 per cent is to be increased to 19 per cent, and the second rate of 30 per cent increased to 32.5 per cent.

Both sides are playing on the public's ignorance of the complexities of the tax system, in particular the operation of the "low-income tax offset" of $1500 a year, which lifts the present effective tax-free threshold from $6000 to $16,000, but is then clawed back after people's incomes exceed $30,000 a year, at the rate of 4? in the dollar.

Under the new arrangement, this offset will be cut to $445 a year and its rate of withdrawal cut to 1.5? in the dollar. When you take this into account, Labor's grand reform becomes a minor reform. Most of the million people aren't paying tax under the present system, they just have to put in a return to claim the offset.

As for Abbott, the change will involve no increase in anyone's effective marginal tax rate. All it means is that the hidden 4 per cent rate at which the offset is withdrawn will no longer be hidden.

The carbon tax is neither as good as Gillard claims nor as bad as Abbott claims. Funny, that.

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It will be neither as good nor as bad as we're told

So now, supposedly, we know exactly what to expect when, as seems likely, the carbon tax comes into effect on July 1 next year.

The average household's costs will increase by about $10 a week. All but the top 10 per cent of households will receive tax cuts and benefit increases to compensate them for this higher cost and two-thirds of households will be fully compensated.

Uncertainty over? Don't you believe it. Now begins the search for the devil in the details. And what a frantic, spine-tingling, imaginative search it will be, led not by seekers after truth but by all those who stand to gain by convincing us disaster is about to befall us and our economy.

There is much distrust of Julia Gillard and her assurances, particularly since she has broken her election promise not to introduce such a tax in this term. But how much trust can we place in her critics? Since the Coalition, in its day, has supported putting a price on carbon emissions, can we be sure Tony Abbott's change of heart isn't motivated primarily by desire to win back government?

We will be assailed by business people telling us how devastating the tax would be for jobs in their industry. Can we be sure they aren't exaggerating as they jockey for concessions? If we doubt the word of politicians, can we trust the predictions of business people?

This scheme is hellishly complex, so it contains much scope for apprehension, justified or otherwise. It is designed to change our behaviour without penalising most households - itself a puzzle to many people - so this will in time change the shape of the economy.

In truth, some industries will gain while others lose. We will hear at full voice from those fearing they will lose, while the winners stay mum, as do the great majority of industries that will be little affected.

Psychology sheds as much light on these questions as does economics. The safest prediction is that the tax won't be as bad as its critics fear, nor as benign as its defenders claim.

We can be sure of this because of humans' well-researched inability to accurately predict the future.

We almost always expect bad things to be worse than they prove to be and good things to be better than they prove.

And psychology teaches us another lesson: once the tax starts we will get used to it very quickly.

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