Thursday, June 5, 2014

RECENT DEVELOPMENTS IN AUSTRALIA’S EXTERNAL SECTOR

UBS HSC Economics Day, Sydney, Thursday, June 5, 2014Australia’s external sector – measured by the balance of payments, the current account deficit and exports and imports – is an important part of the syllabus and, indeed, the economy. Australia would be a very much poorer country if we had no trade with the rest of the world or no flows of capital to and from the rest of the world. And yet with the exception of discussion of...
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Wednesday, June 4, 2014

Changes to HECS debt: a users' guide

There is one glaring exception to the rule that Tony Abbott’s budget cuts are designed to protect higher income-earners at the expense of lower income-earners: the changes to university fees. Although uni students like to see themselves as part of the deserving poor, it’s overwhelmingly the sons and daughters of people in the upper part of the distribution of income who go to university, and...
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Monday, June 2, 2014

Hockey crafts our first decadal budget

This is the 40th budget I've studied, and it's unique. The only decadal budget we've ever had, a budget only an incoming, Coalition government would deliver, a budget with big political costs up front, but a big pay-off way into the future. It's obviously the budget of a new government, one confident it can blame its predecessors for its harsh cuts and broken promises. But it's such a slow-burn, delayed-reward budget that...
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Sunday, June 1, 2014

ENTRY FOR THE COMPANION TO THE AUSTRALIAN MEDIA, ED BRIDGET GRIFFEN-FOLEY, 2014

2014Reporting, economic focuses on reporting developments in the national economy - and, occasionally, the state economies - and the efforts of governments and their agencies to influence the economy. It covers economic policy, micro-economic as well as macro-economic. It is to be distinguished from business (formerly financial) reporting, which focuses on the activities of listed companies and the stock exchange. Economic journalists...
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ECONOMIC POLICY, EMPLOYMENT AND STRUCTURAL CHANGE

June 2014The structure of the economy – particular industries’ relative shares of GDP and total employment, but also the age, gender and full-time/part-time structure of the labour force, and the role and relative size of government – is always changing. It’s always changing because the forces for change bearing down on the economy keep changing. But those forces seem particularly numerous and strong at present.So I want to talk...
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