Growth in world economy will take a toll on the environment

If the world’s population keeps growing, and the poor world’s living standards keep catching up with the rich world’s, how on earth will the environment cope with the huge increase in extraction, processing and disposal of material resources?

It’s a question many people wonder and worry about – without much sign it’s even crossed the mind of the world’s governments.

Until now. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development is about to publish a Global Material Resources Outlook, which uses much fancy modelling to make an educated guess about what’s likely to happen in the future.

The report projects that, over the 50 years to 2060, annual global use of materials – including metals, fossil fuels, biomass (food and fibres) and non-metallic minerals (mainly sand, gravel, limestone and other building materials) – will more than double, from 79 gigatonnes in 2011 to 167 Gt in 2060. Gosh.

So how did the report reach that figure? It started by estimating the likely growth in the world’s population. Although its rate of growth is expected to slow, the world population could increase from 7 billion to 10 billion by 2060.

At the same time, material living standards in the developing countries are expected to continue converging on those of the developed countries.

Gross domestic product per person is expected to continue growing at a much faster rate in the poorer countries than the rich ones. So much so that, by 2060, the global level of real GDP per person is expected to have reached where it was for just the (richer) OECD countries in 2011.

This implies a tripling in global income per person to about $US40,000 a year – after adjusting for PPP, purchasing-power parity, to allow for one US dollar buying a lot more in a poor country than it does Stateside. The fastest catch-up will be in China and, to a lesser extent, India and south-east Asia.

That’s good news for the world’s non-rich. It would be a bit rich for the well-off countries to expect the poor countries to stay poor just to reduce pressure on the natural environment in a way we’re not prepared to.

Multiply world population by world income per person and you get world GDP. It’s expected to quadruple.

Even so, its rate of growth may slow. Whereas at the turn of the century world GDP was growing at an average rate of about 3.5 per cent a year, it’s expected to stabilise at a rate of less than 2.5 per cent well before we reach 2060.

(Why? Partly because of arithmetic. It’s much easier for a small number to grow by a high percentage than for a big number to. But also because, when you’re way behind, it’s relatively easy to catch up with the world’s technological frontrunner, the US, by adopting its better existing technology. Once you’ve done the easy bits, however, it gets harder to grow as fast. China will account for much of the global slowing.)

But hang on. If world GDP is expected to quadruple, how come materials use is expected only to double?

It’s because other things – helpful things – will be going on at the same time. The first is that the world economy is “dematerialising”.

Machines and gadgets are getting smaller and using less metal, but more to the point is the “servitisation” of the world economy (there’s a new ugly buzz word to add to your collection) – the tendency for more of each dollar we spend to go on services rather than goods.

Services have lower materials “intensity” – materials use per unit of output - than goods. The shift in the mix from goods to services is a function of economic development. When you’re poor the main thing you want is more goods, but as you get richer there’s a limit to how much you want to eat or wear and how many cars and TV sets you need. But there’s no limit to how many things you’d like to pay other people to do for you.

This shift is already well advanced in the rich countries, but the poor countries have a lot of infrastructure and housing to build (and a lot of cars and TV sets to buy) before they begin to approach material satiation.

The share of services in world GDP is projected to rise from 50 per cent to 54 per cent over the 50 years.

A second helpful factor is that technological advance should increase the efficiency with which materials are used. The two factors are projected to reduce the materials intensity of world GDP at the faster average rate of 1.3 per cent a year.

So, the report finds, were materials use to keep up with economic growth, annual use would increase by 283 Gt to 362 Gt. But the shift to services will reduce that increase by 111 Gt and technological advance will reduce it by 84 Gt, meaning materials use rises to just 167 Gt in 2060.

Note, however, that this is growth in “primary” materials extraction, not “secondary” use of recycled materials, which the report says is likely to become more competitive and grow at the same rate. So increased recycling is another factor helping to explain the lesser growth in primary extraction.

With GDP growing faster than materials use, the report is expecting a partial “decoupling” of the two.

Of course, there’ll still be a big increase in pollution. Greenhouse gas emissions, but also acidification, freshwater aquatic ecotoxicity, terrestrial ecotoxicity, human toxicity via inhalation or the food chain, photochemical oxidation (smog), ozone layer depletion, and not forgetting increased land fill to dump the materials when we’re done with ’em.

Final point: this “baseline scenario” assumes no change in government policy. That’s the point: it’s intended to show the world’s governments how great is the need for them to make a policy response.

Such as? I’d like to see a tax on materials use, with the proceeds used to reduce the tax on labour income. Similar to a price on carbon, this would do much to encourage recycling, repair and renovation, and economising in the use of materials.

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Tax reform is pushed by rich males, for rich males

I know it’s a shocking thing for an economics writer to confess, but I’ve lost my faith in the Search for the Golden Tax System. I no longer believe that reforming our tax system is the magic key to improving the nation’s economic and social wellbeing.

As we start to review the modest achievements of the Abbott-Turnbull-Morrison government over the past five years, business people, economists and accountants are lamenting its lack of progress on tax reform.

It raised expectations of sorely needed reform, then wilted at the first hint of political difficulty. The Rudd-Gillard-Rudd government did little better in its six years.

So, the zealots are telling us, the tax system remains unreformed, a millstone around our economy whose threat to our future becomes ever-more urgent. Every so often, one of the big four firms of chartered accountants comes up with its own plan to fix everything.

Sorry, not buying. It’s true our tax system is far from ideal, but if after decades of trying we’re still no closer to nirvana, it’s doubtful we ever will be.

Meanwhile, other aspects of the economy just as important to our present and future wellbeing, and just as in need of “reform”, languish while we obsess about taxes.

Such as? Education and training. Health. Cities with long commute times. “Sorry, we’ll get on to it as soon as we’ve increased the GST.”

The never-ending quest for tax reform is being promoted partly by econocrats, tax economists and tax accountants who specialise in the topic and have little to contribute on other issues.

But the biggest push is coming from rich white males in big business. Their goal is to “reform” the tax system so that they and their company pay less and others pay more. No matter how long it takes, they won’t “move on” until they’ve got what they want.

She didn’t put it this way, but the truth that tax “reform” has long been pushed by well-off men for their own benefit – and at the expense of less well-paid women – was demonstrated in a paper given at a tax conference last week by one of our leading tax economists, Professor Patricia Apps, of the University of Sydney Law School.

She showed how the Productivity Commission’s recent report finding there’d been no increase in inequality in recent decades rested on lumping couples’ incomes together, ignoring the difference in contributions by each partner and, in particularly, assuming that “home produced goods and services” - such as childcare, cooking or cleaning - make no contribution to the family’s standard of living, so can be ignored when they have to be bought in because both partners are working.

To be fair, the commission did its analysis the way it’s usually done. But that’s because such analysis is mainly done by men, to whom it never occurs to take account of home production.

Apps used samples of more than 2400 households from the official household expenditure surveys in 2004 and 2016 to divide their income between that contributed by the “primary earner” (mainly male) and the “secondary earner” (mainly female). Primary earners were aged between 20 and 60.

She found that over 12 years, the incomes of primary earners’ in the bottom decile (group of 10 per cent) rose by 53 per cent, increasing to a 78 per cent rise for those in the eighth decile and 124 per cent for the top decile. Look like rising inequality to you?

Then she estimated the income tax those primary earners paid, after adjusting for inflation. Comparing the last year with the first, those in the bottom decile got a real tax saving of $1450 a year, whereas those in the top decile got a saving of $12,340 a year.

So, high income earners benefited most. But get this: after the bottom decile the tax saving fell to a low of $200 for the fifth decile and $370 for the sixth. It then started rising slowly until it leapt for the top decile.

See what’s happened? Very low income earners have done OK, earners at the very top have done brilliantly, and people around the middle have got peanuts. Guess where the (mainly female) secondary earners are likely to be congregated?

Of course, the high income-earners keep telling us their tax rates need to be cut to encourage them to work harder. But Apps has calculated the workers’ “labour supply elasticity”. In effect, she finds it’s very elastic (price-sensitive) for part-timers, but quite inelastic for full-timers, particularly those who’re highly paid.

Looking at primary earners in the top decile, she found that, despite their huge pay rise over the 12 years, and their generous tax cuts, the average number of hours they were working was virtually unchanged.

The various tax changes we’ve had – which aren’t nearly enough to satisfy the tax reformers – have favoured (mainly male) high income-earners, without any sign it’s made them work more.

The people whose decisions about whether to leave the home to do paid work, or to move from part-time to full-time, are those most likely to be affected by the tax they have to pay, but are no better off and probably worse off.

No prize for guessing these are mainly women with children. All this is long known by true tax experts – but just as long ignored. Tax reform is a game for well-off men on the make. Wake me when the women take over.

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Not sure what the economy's up to? Nor are the experts

There are times when the rich world’s macro-economists think they’ve got everything figured, and times when they know they haven’t. The latter is where we are now, with the entire profession scratching its head and wondering what’s causing the economy to behave as it is.

The last time economists thought they had it tabbed was between the mid-1980s and the mid-2000s. The world economy was growing so smoothly they decided we’d entered the Great Moderation and began patting themselves on the back.

Always a bad sign. Next thing we knew the global financial crisis had arrived and with it the Great Recession.

But it’s now a decade since the start of that recession, and it’s clear the advanced economies aren’t back to anything like what they were – even, despite appearances, the American economy.

The problem has various symptoms, but it boils down to slow economic growth, which boils down further to much slower rates of productivity improvement than we’ve been used to. This is surprising when you consider how much digital disruption we’re seeing. Isn’t that aimed at improving productivity?

So why is it happening? That’s anybody’s guess. A host of possible explanations is being advanced and debated. It could be another decade before a new conventional wisdom emerges.

I’ve written before about the thesis that the digital revolution won’t boost productivity the way earlier waves of general-purpose technologies did, about the thesis of “secular stagnation” and yet another idea that the main trouble is decades of weak business investment.

But last week Dr Luci Ellis, a Reserve Bank assistant governor, offered her own thoughts on yet another possible piece in the jigsaw puzzle. Productivity is generated by firms, but Ellis notes that, both in Australia and abroad, the evidence suggests that levels of productivity vary widely between firms, even within the same narrowly defined industry.

“Firms that are highly productive – so-called superstar firms – tend to grow faster, grow employment faster, and pay better than firms that are a long way from the frontier of productivity”, she says.

But there’s a problem. Because these superstar firms are more productive than average, they gain market share at the expense of less-productive competitors.

The leading firms could start moving further and further ahead of the pack.

Those that lag behind would then find it harder and harder to catch up. The result could be that markets become more concentrated.

“The market leader begins to reap monopoly profits, which isn’t good for consumers and might not be good for long-run innovation and [society’s] welfare”, she says.

But must the laggard firms never catch up? That may depend on why so many firms are lagging. If it’s because they lack managerial ability, it ought to be possible for them to copy the leaders’ superior approach or even poach their rival’s managers. If so, this would lift the whole industry’s – and the nation’s – productivity.

But what if the laggards have lower productivity because they aren’t adopting the latest technology the way the superstars are? There’s evidence this is the case in other advanced economies, but Ellis says we don’t yet know if it’s true in Australia.

If this superstar pattern has arisen only recently, it could be something to do with the nature of developments in digital technology and their ease of adoption.

Previous waves of general-purpose technologies, such as electricity or the earlier round of computerisation, had the benefit of reducing the level of skill needed to operate them, whereas innovations such as machine learning and artificial intelligence seem to have a very different character, she says.

“Using machine learning and other emerging techniques to automate routine business processes seems to involve specialist skills and, often, PhD-level training in statistics or computer science. These skills are much rarer and take longer to develop than those required for the jobs that are thereby replaced.

“That doesn’t mean it’s impossible, but it could take a long time,” she says.

And get this: if leading-edge technologies are (at present, anyway) unusually costly or difficult to adopt, they become a kind of barrier to entry protecting the firms that are already using those technologies.

That would be a worry if lagging firms never caught up. And if incumbents never face rivals, they’re more likely to become complacent. “Innovation could slow down, and growth in living standards with it”, she concludes.

So, is this the big reason productivity improvement has slowed throughout the advanced economies? Far too soon to say.

But it makes an important point: the problem, and the solution, lie in the hands of our big companies.

Governments may have a role in spending more – and more wisely – on education and training, but giving up a lot of revenue to cut the rate of company tax isn’t likely to make much difference.

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Sorry, small business has no special sauce for jobs

Scott Morrison is surely on a winner with his decision to step up pursuit of jobs and growth by bringing forward the time when small and medium businesses have their company tax rate cut to 25 per cent.

Certainly, it’s likely to be a popular decision, not just with the owners of the more than 3 million businesses who’ll be paying a bit less tax, but also with a lot of ordinary voters.

After all, as everyone knows, small business is the backbone of the economy and its engine room. It’s where most of the economy’s jobs are.

How does everyone know it? Because that’s what politicians – and the small business lobby – keep telling us.

This is why Morrison is so confident of getting the bring-forward passed by the Senate.

Cutting the smaller-business company tax rate to 25 per cent by 2021-22 rather than 2026-27 will have an additional cost to revenue of $3.2 billion over four years.

Only about $1.3 billion of this would be offset by the government’s abandonment of its plan to cut the tax rate for bigger businesses. The rest would be covered by repaying government debt more slowly than previously projected.

There’s likely to be enough cross-benchers keen to push the fast-tracking through – big business may not be judged worthy of a tax cut, but smaller business is - even if Labor isn’t playing ball.

But it seems Labor will be. Why? Because it, too, professes to believe small business is what the economy revolves around.

According to its official policy: “Small businesses make a huge contribution to national prosperity and supporting Australian jobs. Small businesses play a central role in the economy.”

There’s just one problem with all this stuff. It ain’t true.

When you study the facts and figures, there’s no reason to believe small business has any economic virtue not possessed by businesses of any other size. If anything, the reverse.

I’ve spent my whole career as an economic journalist refuting the delusional claims of this or that part of the private sector to be more worthy than the rest of it.

If it’s not small business claiming to be the economy’s engine room, it’s farmers claiming to be the bedrock on which the rest of the economy is built, or manufacturing claiming that making things is more virtuous than doing things (providing services).

There are all those ads telling us it’s mining the country most depends on. (They’re trying to draw attention away from the truth that mining is hugely profitable, about 80 per cent foreign owned, avoids as much tax as possible and employs surprisingly few workers.)

Then there are the exporters claiming that producing things for sale to foreigners is more important than producing things for sale to locals.

Plus, of course, the common delusion that the private sector is “productive” whereas the public sector is unproductive and even parasitic. Do you really think curing the sick or teaching the young – or even directing the traffic – is unproductive? That people in the private sector pay taxes, but workers in the public sector don’t?

It’s all economically illiterate hype. And it’s used to try to justify demands that the government give my bit of the economy a special deal not available to other bits. Economists’ name for it is “rent-seeking”. (Though, as recent events remind us, no one does rent-seeking better than the Catholic schools.)

But back to measuring against the facts the claims that small business has a special sauce when it comes to jobs. It’s complicated by the fact that the usual way of measuring the size of businesses is according to the number of their employees, whereas eligibility for the lower company tax rate is determine by the size of a business’s turnover (sales, not profits).

Morrison says there are more than 3 million businesses with turnover of less than $50 million a year, employing “nearly 7 million Australians”.

If so, that’s more than half of our total “employed persons” of 12.6 million. But about a third of those 7 million would be in medium-size businesses, not small.

According to the latest figures from the Australian Bureau of Statistics, for 2016-17, small business (defined as firms with fewer than 20 employees) has 4.8 million workers, medium-size business (20 to 199 employees) has 2.6 million workers and large business (200 plus) has 3.5 million.

That means small business employs just 44 per cent of the private sector workforce and about 40 per cent of the total workforce.

But just because a sector employs a lot of workers, that doesn’t necessarily mean it's creating jobs faster than other sectors.

Over the two years to June 2017, small business may have had 44 per cent of the existing private sector jobs, but it accounted for only 18 per cent of the growth in jobs.

Overall, private sector employment grew by 2.3 per cent, but small business employment grew by just 0.9 per cent. Combine small and medium and they grew by 2.3 per cent, about the same rate large-business employment growth.

And this during a period when smaller businesses were paying a lower rate of tax, supposedly to encourage them to create more jobs.

Actually, the lack of apparent response shouldn’t be a surprise. The typical tax saving is small. Morrison himself says that an independent supermarket or a pub that makes a $500,000 annual profit would save $12,500 in 2021-22 “to invest back into the business or staff, or help to manage cash flow”.

That doesn’t buy many jobs, nor many pay rises. And since businesses are free to use their tax saving however they see fit, there’s no reason to think they’ll favour more jobs or higher wages. No more than big businesses would.

If Morrison’s on a winner, it’s a political winner, not an economic one.

But if there’s nothing special about small business, why do politicians on both sides keep spreading the sector’s propaganda that it is special?

Because the many more owners of small businesses have far more votes than the relatively few bosses of big businesses do. It's politics, not economics.

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Want a more capable nation? Start younger

The older I get, the more unimpressed I become with both sides – all sides – of politics. And the more disdainful I become of people who let loyalty to a particular party determine their support or opposition to particular policies. Don’t think for yourself, just follow your herd of choice.

On the other hand, since I do care about policy, I shouldn’t be slow to give a tick to whatever side is first to come up with a good one. So, two cheers for Bill Shorten for promising to extend universal access to preschool to three-year-olds.

The Coalition government and its predecessors, together with the state governments, have done a good job of ensuring almost all four-year-olds are now attending preschool for the equivalent of two days a week during the school year (though, for reasons I can’t fathom, the feds have insisted on guaranteeing funding for only a year at a time).

Trouble is, getting four-year-olds to preschool takes us only halfway to catching up with most other advanced economies, even New Zealand. So, with any luck, Scott Morrison won’t be too proud to match Labor’s promise to extend it to three-year-olds.

Why is an economics writer getting so excited about preschools? Because I can’t think of any other single initiative more likely to benefit us socially and economically.

And to do so at a relatively modest cost to taxpayers – particularly when you remember that the kids you help most will end up working more and paying more tax, while costing the government less in welfare benefits and accommodation courtesy of Her Maj.

For anyone who’s been living under a rock for the past 25 years, perhaps the most important and useful scientific discovery of our times is that the human brain develops rapidly in the first five years of life, and both the nurturing and the intellectual stimulation a child receives in that time has huge influence over their wellbeing during their lives.

An independent report prepared last year for state and territory governments by Susan Pascoe, of the Australian Council for International Development, and Professor Deborah Brennan, of the University of NSW, found “extensive and consistent” research evidence of the benefits of quality early childhood education.

The years before school are “the period when children learn to communicate, get along with others and control and adapt their behaviour, emotions and thinking".

“These skills and behaviours establish the foundations for future skills and success. They are provided in most, but not all, homes”, the report says.

Quality early childhood education gives all children the best chance of establishing these capabilities. Without these foundations in place, children often struggle at school, and then often go on to become adults who struggle in life, it says.

This is why the measured benefits of early education are greatest for vulnerable or disadvantaged children, including Indigenous children. “Support for these children is vital – children who start school behind their peers stay behind. Quality early childhood education can help stop this from happening, and break the cycle of disadvantage,” the report says.

It finds that quality early childhood education makes a significant contribution to achieving educational excellence in schools. There’s growing evidence that participation in early education improves school readiness and lifts NAPLAN results and scores in international tests.

“Children who participate in high-quality early childhood education are more likely to complete year 12 and less likely to repeat grades or require additional support."

It also has broader impacts: it’s linked with higher levels of employment, income and financial security, improved health outcomes and reduced crime. It helps build the skills children will need for the jobs of the future.

These days, childcare and early childhood education overlap, which explains why childcare is now called ECEC – early childhood education and care. Ordinary childcare for the under-threes now involves a higher proportion of TAFE-trained early childhood educators.

The two years of preschool we’re considering would occur in a range of settings: long daycare centres, community preschools and kindies, and schools. For parents with children already in care, 15 hours a week would be funded by the government, cutting costs to families.

But all this talk of “education” doesn’t mean hothousing young minds. As Professor Alison Elliott, of Central Queensland University, explains, learning is “play-based” – meaning children learn through play, both self-directed (“free play”) and guided by a trained adult following the official “early years learning framework”.

Preschool gives children access to a four-year degree-qualified early childhood teacher. Elliott notes that one problem in expanding preschool to three-year-olds is the present extreme shortage of early childhood teachers and educators.

But for those who’ve wondered “where will the jobs come from?” – especially after the robots arrive – what’s a problem for some is an opportunity for others. Such skilled jobs are likely to be full-time and permanent; they won’t be in the “gig economy”.

And those jobs will be created by bigger government – greater provision or subsidisation of public services, paid for by our higher taxes. In this and other areas, government will be a key source of additional employment.

Pascoe and Brennan point out that the linking of childcare and early childhood education allows governments to deliver us a “double dividend”: if they do it right, they can subsidise childcare to encourage parents’ participation in the paid workforce, while also promoting children’s wellbeing, learning and development. Sounds good to me.

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The long run is now, and bills are arriving

It’s easy to take Keynes’ dictum that “in the long run we’re all dead” out of context. When you do, you can come badly unstuck - as the banks and insurance companies are discovering.

In case you’ve ever wondered, economists see the short term as being for a year or two, the medium term as about the next 10 years, and the long term as everything further away than that.

See the point? If the long run is only 10, 15, 20 years from now, you won’t be dead. Nor will most of the people around you at work. The economy will still be alive and kicking in 20 years’ time and, in all probability, so will your company.

In which case, spending too many years making short-sighted decisions could leave you looking pretty bad if you haven’t had the foresight to skip town.

For many years people have bemoaned “short-termism” – the tendency to favour quick results over longer-term consequences. To go for the flashy at the expense of patient investment in future performance. To do things where the benefits are upfront, and the costs much later, even when the initial appearance of success actually worsens the likely outcomes down the track.

Short-termism seems particularly to have infected big business. Listed companies are under considerable pressure to ensure every half-year profit is bigger than the last.

This pressure comes from the sharemarket, from “analysts”, but more particularly from institutional investors – the super funds, banks and insurance companies that manage the savings of ordinary people, invested mainly in company shares.

Although the “instos” don’t actually own many of the shares they control, they represent the shares’ ultimate owners (you and me) by continuously pressuring companies to get higher and higher profits – which will lead to ever-higher share prices.

It’s long been alleged that the short-termism the sharemarket forces on big business – to which companies have responded by trying to align executive pay with profits and the share price – has led firms to underinvest in projects with high risks or long payback periods.

If so, this fits with former senior econocrat Dr Mike Keating’s thesis that the advanced economies’ weak growth in activity, productivity and real wages is explained mainly by a protracted period of weak investment.

But the banking royal commission is a stark reminder to a lot of companies, the sharemarket and shareholders that after years of short-sighted, corner-cutting, even illegal behaviour, the long run has arrived, we’re all still alive and there are bills to be paid.

Those bills will take many forms. It’s likely some of the borderline customer-harming behaviour will become illegal, and so won’t be available to keep profits heading onward and upward every half-year.

Banks and insurance companies found to have mistreated their customers in ways that are outright illegal, will face big bills for restitution.

But probably the biggest bill comes under the heading of “reputational damage”. As Australian Competition and Consumer Commission boss Rod Sims reminded us in a speech, most companies spend much time and money promoting and protecting their “brand”.

A highly-regarded brand is money in the bank to the firm that owns it – as you see just by comparing the prices of branded and unbranded goods on a supermarket shelf. Brands engender trust – that the product is of consistently good quality and will do what it promises to do – and often social status.

But, as Sims says mildly, “bad behaviour by a company can undermine its brand reputation”.

“A key value of the royal commission has been to expose the poor behaviour of financial institutions to public scrutiny. The evidence about the conduct of AMP was particularly damning. The resulting damage to AMP’s brand reputation has been substantial.”

Sure has. And that damage to AMP’s reputation and likely future profitability has seen its share price fall by 35 per cent since its first day in the witness box in April.

Sims says one way to discourage misbehaviour by companies is to “identify and shine a light on bad behaviour”.

“The greater the likelihood that bad behaviour will be exposed and made public, the more companies will do to guard against such behaviours,” he says.

Get it? The regulators are wising up, and in future will do more to name and shame offenders – to diminish brand reputation – so as to discourage short-sighted, take-no-thought-for-the-morrow behaviour. To move firms from the short run to the long run.

So far, the big four banks’ share prices have fallen only a per cent or two since the release of the commission’s interim report. But my guess is they have a lot further to fall once we see the full price they’ll be paying for past short-run profit-maximising behaviour, and how much less scope there’ll be for such behaviour “going forward”.

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Why so many businesses are behaving badly

While we digest the royal commission’s evidence of shocking misconduct by the banks and insurance companies, there’s another unpalatable truth to swallow: they have no monopoly on bad behaviour.

It seems almost everywhere you look you see examples of companies behaving badly. In a major speech he gave a few months ago, the chairman of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, Rod Sims, offered a remarkable list of business household names the commission was taking proceedings against, as I noted at the time.


Commissioner Kenneth Hayne has given us a lawyer’s explanation of why the banks misbehave, but Sims’ speech offers an economist’s explanation.

It’s an important, though sensitive, question for economists since their simple “neo-classical” model of markets predicts firms won’t mistreat their customers because, if they did, they’d lose them to a competitor.

Sims offers seven reasons for this evident “market failure” – a term economists use to acknowledge when real world markets fail to deliver the benefits the textbook model promises.

First, he says, meeting customer needs may not be the main way companies succeed.

On the supply side, markets and economies are driven by the desire of firms to earn and grow profits. (On the demand side, markets are driven by the self-interest of consumers seeking the best deal they can get.)

Nothing wrong with that. Indeed, it often means that those businesses best at meeting the needs of consumers over the longer term do best and survive longest.

“However”, Sims concedes, “being the best at meeting the needs of consumers is not the only, or even the dominant, way firms succeed. Staying ahead of rivals through continual improvement is a difficult task for most companies; eventually, someone [else] works out how to do things better and cheaper.”

“Commercial strategy therefore is largely about building defences against the forces of competition. To make it more difficult for other firms to develop a better product. Or, if they do, to limit their access to customers.” Much of this is perfectly legal.

Michael Porter, the doyen of corporate strategists, from Harvard Business School, demonstrated that firms can best attain commercial success by reducing the number of competitors, by erecting high barriers to new firms entering the market, by keeping suppliers dispersed and weak, by using brands or the bundling of products to create strong consumer loyalty, and by reducing the likelihood of other firms being able to offer your customers products those customers see as substitutable for your product (that is, by “product differentiation”).

Sims’ second reason customers may not get treated well is that executives are under considerable sharemarket pressure to increase short-term profits, so as to increase share prices. Executives’ bonuses are often geared to achieving this.

Many companies set a sales or profit target higher than the growth in nominal gross domestic product, meaning not all of them can achieve it. This can induce some executives to push the boundaries and ignore the risk of reputational damage over the longer term.

Third, in some markets poor firm behaviour goes unpunished by customers. This can be so because customers don’t see what’s been done to them – that they’re being misled, or that firms have formed an (illegal) cartel to keep prices high.

Or it can happen because customers don’t have viable alternative products to turn to. Or switching to another provider may be too difficult or costly. Firms may deliberately make it hard to compare their product with their competitors’.

Fourth, competition can become a race to the bottom rather than the top if firms gain a competitive edge through poor behaviour that goes undetected and unpunished. Stay pure and you lose business. A firm can know it’s bad practice, but not be game to be the first to stop doing it.

Fifth, companies may give their staff financial incentives without adequate safeguards to prevent mistreatment of customers.

Companies can establish poor business models, such as arrangements that leave franchisees little room to achieve a return on their investment while paying their workers award wages.

Sixth, customers can consider themselves badly treated when firms (including banks and power companies) engage in “price dispersion” – charging new customers a lower price than existing customers – which is a common practice and perfectly legal.

Economists have often judged this to be a good thing - “welfare enhancing”. But Sims notes that such behaviour imposes extra search costs (spending leisure time checking to see that companies you deal with aren’t taking advantage of you) which are a loss to society.

(He could have added than the economists’ simple model assumes away all search costs – an example of “model blindness”, by which economists mislead themselves.)

Finally, customers can suffer if executives’ loyalty to their company leads them to sail closer to the edge of what’s legal than they would in their private lives. If some lawyer tells you it’s not illegal, does that make it honest?

Not surprisingly, the economist’s explanation of why businesses behave badly is very different to the judge’s. But when it comes to what we can do about it, Sims and Hayne aren’t far apart.

Commissioner Hayne’s answer is not to pass new laws outlawing conduct that’s already illegal, but to increase penalties so as to make them a realistic deterrent to big businesses whose size means their misconduct in just one area can earn them huge sums, and then police the law with far more vigour and diligence that so far shown by the financial regulators, including Treasury.

Sims has several suggestions. Increase the "private cost" of bad behaviour by identifying and shining a light on bad behaviour, increasing penalties and continually looking for new ways to increase regulators’ ability to identify and pursue bad behaviour.

Markets will never be as competitive as the textbook model assumes, but Sims says governments should ensure they’re as competitive as possible.

And they should bolster competition on the consumer side by taking measures to lower customers’ search costs – the time and effort needed to find the best deal.

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How a better business culture is within reach

Last week must have been a terrifying wake-up call for Australia’s ruling class – not just our politicians, but also the chief executives and directors of our big corporations, both publicly and privately owned.

If they’re half as smart as they’re supposed to be – after all, we’re told they got their jobs on merit – their performance of their duties will be much improved “going forward”.

The problems at the ABC – managing director sacked and chairman resigned in the same week – and the problem behaviour of our banks are very different, but they have one thing in common.

Members of the ABC board were made aware, if they hadn’t already known, of the chairman’s alleged interference in the day-to-day running of the corporation in a way that endangered its independence from the elected government, but chose to do nothing. Until that knowledge became public and the public’s horrified reaction obliged them to act.

The directors of our big banks presided for many years over a system of remuneration incentives – from the chief executive down – that rewarded staff for putting profit before people.

If the directors didn’t know this was leading to bank customers being mistreated, regulators misled and laws broken, it can only be because they didn’t want to know.

Well now, thanks to the royal commission’s shocking revelations, all of us know the extent of the banks’ misconduct. And the directors have nowhere to hide.

See the link between the two cases? When you’re on a board, it’s easy to see how things look from the viewpoint of the insiders – the people in the room, and on the floors below. What’s harder to see, and give adequate weight to, is the viewpoint of outsiders.

But that’s the board members’ duty, statutory and moral: to represent the interests of outsiders, including the shareholders, but also other “stakeholders”. To view things more objectively than management does. To avoid falling into groupthink. To rock the boat if it needs rocking.

A good question is: how would it look if what’s now private became public? Because that’s what happened last week. And now a lot of executives and directors are viewing the consequences of their acquiescence with fresh eyes and are not proud of what they see.

The ABC’s governance problems, we must hope, will be fixed relatively quickly. The misconduct of the banks is a much tougher problem.

The interim report of the banking royal commission carried a wake-up call also for the financial regulators – particularly the Australian Securities and Investments Commission and the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority, but also the Reserve Bank and Treasury.

Allow yourself to be captured by the people you’re supposed to be regulating, and one day your failure to do your duty according to law will be exposed for all to see. How good will you feel?

Get too cosy and obliging, and the banks take advantage of you behind your back. Conclude from things they say - and the way they keep cutting your funding – that your political masters want you to go easy on their generous-donor mates in banking and, when the balloon goes up, the pollies will step aside and point at you.

Since you did neglect your duty to protect the public’s interests, you won’t have a leg to stand on.

Some people were disappointed the interim report contained no recommendations – no tougher legislation, no referrals to the legal authorities – but I was heartened by Commissioner Kenneth Hayne’s grasp of the root cause of the problem and the smart way to tackle it.

Too often, he found, the misconduct was motivated by “greed - the pursuit of short-term profit at the expense of basic standards of honesty . . . From the executive suite to the front line, staff were measured and rewarded by reference to profit and sales”.

Just so. But what induces seemingly decent people to put (personal) profit before people? That’s a question for psychologists, not lawyers. We’re social animals with an unconscious, almost irresistible urge to fit in with the group. A tribal urge.

Most of us get our sense of what’s ethical behaviour from the people around us in our group. If what I’m doing is no worse than what they’re doing, that’s ethical. Few of us have an inner moral compass (set by our membership of other tribes – religious or familial) strong enough to override the pressure we feel under from what our bosses and workmates are saying and doing.

Sociologists call this “norms of acceptable behaviour” within the group. When regulators first said that banks had an unhealthy corporate “culture”, business leaders dismissed this as soft-headed nonsense. Now, no one’s arguing.

But, we’re told, how can you legislate to change culture? Passing laws won’t eliminate dishonesty.

Fortunately, that’s only half true. Rationality tells us people’s behaviour flows from their beliefs, but psychologists tell us it’s the other way round: if you can change people’s behaviour, they’ll change their beliefs to fit (so as to reduce their “cognitive dissonance”).

Hayne says “much more often than not, the conduct now condemned was contrary to law”, which leads him to doubt that passing new laws is the answer.

So what is? His hints make it pretty clear, and I think he’s right. Make sure everyone in banking knows what’s illegal, then police the law vigorously with meaningful penalties. Fear of getting caught will override greed, and a change in behaviour will be reinforced by an improvement in the banking culture.

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Digital disruption is changing us for better and worse

The rise of the internet and other aspects of the digital revolution has changed our working and private lives – mainly for the better. But all technological advance has its downside.

We tend to soon take the benefits for granted and are only starting to understand the costs.

To start with the latest, how many of us watched every moment of either or both grand finals, compared with how many of us actually attended the grounds?

If many of us did neither, it’s because digitisation has greatly multiplied the range of rival entertainments available to us – including while we’re supposed to be working.

Of course, the televising of sport – which has commercialised almost every (male) comp – began long before the internet. But it’s now digitally enhanced.

Trouble is, we seem to be watching more sport, but playing less. Is this a net plus?

Staying with leisure, who hasn’t passed many pleasant hours watching YouTube? Or spent hours on Facebook – still the only commercially significant social medium – thinking how much more exciting their friends’ adventures are compared to their own, or how better-looking or happier their grandkids are.

Mobile phones and social media have given us much more frequent contact with family and friends – although I agree with social commentator Hugh Mackay that digital contact is greatly inferior, in terms of emotional satisfaction and effective communication, to face-to-face contact.

We spend so much of our lives staring at screens, which seem to get smaller when we’re on the go, and ever bigger when we’re at home.

Indeed, I sometimes think there can be few white-collar jobs left – from chief executive to office kid - that don’t consist mainly of sitting at a desk in an office, staring at a screen. As a consequence, many jobs have become more office-bound.

Reporters, for instance, use up far less shoe leather. They “attend” a media conference without leaving the office. The hearings of the banking royal commission occurred mainly in Melbourne, but my colleague Clancy Yeates listened to almost every word by staying stuck to his desk in Sydney.

The internet has revolutionised banking, bill paying and how we pay for things in shops or repay a friend – and there’s a lot more to come. You need to be very old to think it noteworthy that these days we rarely darken the doors of our bank branch.

In the day, city workers devoted much of their lunch hours to walking a few streets to pay an electricity bill at the power company’s office. These days, you pay bills via the internet – or set up an arrangement to have them paid automatically.

(Lunch hours are disappearing, too. Eat something at your desk. But while you’re eating, it’s OK to switch from doing spreadsheets to catching up with the news on your favourite newspaper’s website.)

Some people find it harder to manage their money because it’s now less tangible and more conceptual. Pay envelopes stuffed with notes were long ago replaced by direct credits to your bank account. You pay for things with a plastic card (meaning many young people have trouble learning to manage their credit card). We now wave a card – or a phone – to pay the tiniest of amounts in stores.

When the Reserve Bank’s “new payments platform” – allowing you to move money from one account to another if you know, say, the other person’s mobile phone number – is fully adopted, it will be one of the last nails in the coffin of cheques, and bank notes will be a step closer to being used only by people up to no good.

Digital disruption – which has much further to run – almost always brings pain to conventional producers and their workers, but benefits to consumers. Digitised products are always more convenient and usually cheaper. They bring wider choice and easier comparison.

Online shopping is in the process of eliminating the “Australia tax”, whereby Australians pay higher prices for many items than consumers in America and elsewhere, but are sometimes blocked from accessing the cheaper foreign sites.

The digital revolution is changing the structure of our economy (as well as all the other advanced economies) in ways we don’t yet know about, don’t fully understand and don’t even know how to measure properly.

While the punters bang on about the cost of living, the Reserve Bank says one reason consumer price inflation stays so low is that heightened competition in retailing – most of it related directly or indirectly to digitisation – is forcing down prices, or holding them down.

Now we’re told that weak growth in wages is explained partly by the slowness with which advances in technology are spreading from the leading firm in an industry to the rest of them.

If so, that’s another downside from the digital revolution.

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How economists lost their fear of minimum wage rises

Do rises in the minimum wage come at the expense of jobs? If you listen to the employer groups, they certainly do. But this is a question on which economists have changed their tune.

So much so that the latest issue of the Reserve Bank’s Bulletin includes an article by one of its researchers, James Bishop, concluding there’s no evidence that modest, incremental increases in minimum award wages have an adverse effect on hours worked or the rate of job destruction.

There’s no way the Reserve would have said such a thing 20 years ago.

For decades, most economists did believe increases in the minimum wage would cause employment to be lower than otherwise if they took the wage rate above where market forces would have set it – the “market-clearing” price at which the quantity supplied and the quantity demanded were equal.

Their certainty came from elementary economic theory. Their simple “neo-classical” model of markets, the bedrock on which most economists’ thinking is based, told them that if you raise the price of something without any change in its supply, you’ll cause less of it to be demanded.

That was as true for the price of labour as it was for the price of bananas or anything else.

This continued to be the conventional wisdom among economists until 1994, when two American economists, David Card and Alan Krueger, published the results of their “natural experiment” in which they compared what happened in 410 fast food restaurants in two adjoining states after New Jersey raised its minimum wage by 19 per cent but Pennsylvania didn’t.

To much amazement, they found that the rise in the price of labour actually led to a small rise in employment, not a fall.

In other words, they checked the theory against the real world and found it wanting.

This implied that the simplified model of demand and supply might be good for predicting the consequences of a rise in the price of bananas, but it isn’t much good at predicting developments in a market where every unit of labour is different and comes with a human attached.

A model that could predict the outcome Card and Krueger found is one that assumes employers have a degree of market power over wages, allowing them to fix wage rates below where a free market would put them, until the government intervened.

Card and Krueger’s challenge to the conventional wisdom set off decades of empirical studies throughout the developed world trying to replicate or refute their findings. Not surprisingly – since academic economics is riven by ideological conflict – they found both.

Bishop says that, on balance, the weight of evidence is that “modest and incremental increases in minimum wages do not have significant adverse effects on hours worked and job loss”.

But Australia’s system of minimum wages is very different to other countries’ systems, and there hasn’t been much empirical testing here.

Countries such as Britain, Germany and New Zealand set a single national minimum wage; in the United States it varies by state.

In Oz we, too, have a national minimum wage, but we also have more than 100 industrial awards covering particular industries or occupations, each of which sets a number of minimum wage rates for particular job classifications covered by that award.

Awards cover those aspects of employees' pay and conditions that they’re permitted to cover by the national Fair Work Act. Awards are awarded by the Fair Work Commission after submissions from unions and employer groups and they have the force of law.

Pay someone less than the minimum amount specified in the relevant award and you’re breaking the law.

It’s true, of course, that many workers’ pay – a good third of all employees – is determined by their enterprise agreement rather than their award. The wage rates specified in agreements are usually a fair bit higher than those in the award.

Roughly 40 per cent of employees are covered by “individual arrangements” between the individual and their employer, which may be formal (written) or informal. These wage rates need to be at least as high as provided in the individual’s award.

Not a huge number of workers depend on the national minimum wage (of $18.93 an hour, $719 a week and $37,406 a year), but many workers are paid according the much higher minimums set out in their award.

And here’s the trick: when, after a public hearing, the Fair Work Commission decides by how much it will increase the national minimum wage on July 1 each year, it increases the thousands of minimums set out in awards by the same percentage. (The highest award minimum is $171 an hour.)

So our minimum wage directly affects the wages paid to about a quarter of all employees. That’s a much higher proportion than in the other rich economies.

What’s more, the minimum wage increase probably affects many more workers indirectly, particularly those on individual arrangements.

Our national minimum wage has long been among the highest in the rich countries, both in its absolute level and relative to the median wage.

Consider this: while the wage price index has been rising by only about 2 per cent a year in recent years, the annual increase in the minimum wage was 3.5 per cent this year, 3.3 per cent last year and 2.4 per cent in 2016.

All these are the reasons it was important for Bishop to study our minimum wages to check that the broad conclusions reached in other countries also apply to us.

He did, and they do. He finds that our minimum wage increases “appear to have no discernible adverse effect on hours worked or job loss”.

But minimum wages being the contentious topic they are, he’s quick to add some qualifications.

“The results do not necessarily generalise to large, unanticipated changes in award wages. There will always be some point at which a minimum wage adjustment will begin to reduce employment significantly,” he says.

And here’s a worry: “It is possible that the adverse consequences of higher wage floors may be borne by job seekers, rather than current job holders.”

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Political corruption: with so much smoke, there must be fire

How easy is it for the rich and powerful to buy favourable treatment from our politicians? Honest answer: we just don’t know. What we do know is that we’ve become increasing distrustful of our pollies and doubtful of their honesty.

Polling conducted this year by Griffith University and Transparency International Australia found that 85 per cent of respondents believe at least some federal Members of Parliament are corrupt. This is up 9 points just since 2016. It includes 18 per cent who believe most or all federal politicians are corrupt.

Fully 62 per cent of respondents believe officials or politicians use their positions to benefit themselves or their family, while 56 per cent believe officials or politicians favour businesses and individuals in return for political donations or support.

I can’t prove it, but I doubt it’s nearly that bad. Cases of money in paper bags changing hands would be few and far between. Such personal corruption as exists would usually be more subtle: hospitality in corporate boxes at sporting events and sponsored international travel.

Plus the risk that senior politicians and bureaucrats go easy on interest groups in the hope that, when they retire or leave the parliament, those groups will show their gratitude by giving them a cushy job.

But it’s institutional, not personal, corruption that’s the bigger problem. Businesses, unions and others give money to political parties in the hope of gaining access to decision makers and influence over their decisions.

Both sides of politics play this corrupting game because they’re locked in a kind of arms race to raise the most money for advertising at the next election campaign.

It’s so blatant that both sides hold fundraising dinners where they make no bones about people paying big bucks to sit at the same table as a cabinet minister.

It’s said half of all money spent on advertising is wasted, and I suspect it’s the same with political donations. They didn’t buy you what you were hoping for. It’s this half the pollies use to tell themselves they’re not doing anything dishonourable.

It’s the other half that’s the worry – the half that does buy access and influence. (This is what concerns me as an economic journalist. The prevalence of “rent-seeking”, as economists call it, has a pernicious effect on economic policy and thus the economic welfare of Australians.)

On Monday, the Grattan Institute released a painstaking and comprehensive examination by Danielle Wood and Kate Griffiths of what evidence is available on attempts to buy access and influence.

The report reminds us that federal politicians are much more reluctant than their state counterparts to be more active and open about their relations with donors and lobbyists.

They’ve long refused to follow the states in establishing an anti-corruption commission, wanting us to believe the states may suffer corruption, but the feds are pure as the driven snow. Clearly, we don’t.

The feds have resisted making ministers’ diaries public, so we can see who they’re meeting with, even though the NSW and Queensland governments now do so.

The federal register of lobbyists is a bad joke. It lists people working for lobbying firms, but not lobbyists working directly for businesses, unions or community groups, nor the lobbyists working for peak industry or union associations.

The report finds there are about 500 lobbyists on the register, whereas a further 1755 sponsored security passes have been issued. These allow the holders to move freely around Parliament House. May we know who these people are and who they represent? No.

The report finds that more than a quarter of federal ministers have gone on to work for a lobbying firm, industry body or special interest group since 1990. (Former Labor minsters rarely return to the labour movement because business pays much higher salaries.)

Federal ministers are supposed to wait until 18 months after they cease being ministers before lobbying on any issue they were involved in. For ministerial advisers and senior public servants the waiting time is 12 months.

But many fail to observe the rule – including Ian Macfarlane, Andrew Robb, Bruce Billson, Martin Ferguson – and there’s no penalty.

Rules about making political donations public are much improved in some states, but worst at the federal level. Parties spent $368 million over the two financial years spanning the 2016 federal election, with roughly a third of that coming from government grants rather than donations.

There’s a high threshold for donations to be reportable, and no requirement for parties to add up multiple below-threshold donations from the same source. And delays of a year or two before donations are made public.

The report finds that about 40 per cent of the money parties received had no identifiable source. Of the declared donations, just 5 per cent of donors contributed more than half.

By far the biggest share of declared federal donations comes from highly regulated industries – mining, property construction, gambling, finance, media and telcos – then unions.

This appalling record on federal disclosure, accountability and transparency tells us the public’s perception that our politicians are dishonest is of the politicians' own making.

They do tout for donations. They could agree to end the election advertising war by imposing limits on donations and no longer have to prostitute themselves.

When both sides finally decide there’s not much glory in being in a despised and distrusted occupation, nor much joy in basing policy decisions on rewarding the most generous vested interests, they know where to start in restoring their reputation.

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Frydenberg must lift Treasury’s game on spending control

I read that our new Treasurer, Josh Frydenberg, has already understood the chief requirement of his office: the ability to say no to ministerial colleagues wanting to spend more on 101 worthy projects.

Sorry, Josh, but if you’re hoping to be a successful treasurer in the years beyond the coming election, you – and your Treasury minions - will need to do much better than that.

It takes strength, but zero brain power, to say no to everything in the belief that, though a fair bit will get through, enough won’t to keep the budget on track for the ever-growing surpluses projected from 2019-20 onwards.

As we’re reminded by the Parliamentary Budget Office’s report on those projections out to 2028-29, the Abbott-Turnbull government has done a good job in restraining the growth in its spending so far.

Whereas in the 14 years to 2006-07 the Keating and Howard governments racked up real spending growth averaging 3.2 per cent a year, in this government’s term real spending growth so far has averaged just 1.5 per cent a year.

Trouble is, it’s hard to see any government maintaining such an extraordinary degree of restraint – repression? – for many years to come. That’s particularly likely to be so once the budget’s back in surplus and the net public debt is falling.

(A tell-tale sign of the been-there-done-that syndrome is Scott Morrison “doing a Swanny”: portraying the forecast return to tiny surplus by June 2020 as already in the bag.)

After such a period of discipline, the pressure to let out the budgetary stays will be huge. Yet the forward estimates for the four years to 2021-22 imply real spending growth averaging just 1.8 per cent.

This is composed mainly of increases in spending on the national disability insurance scheme of more than 0.6 percentage points of gross domestic product, more than 0.1 points for defence and almost 0.1 points for aged care, offset by falls of about 0.2 points each for road and rail infrastructure, pharmaceutical benefits, and the family tax benefit, and falls of about 0.1 points each for the disability support pension, veterans and public debt interest payments, plus a fall of 0.3 points for administrative costs.

The projected increases are easier to believe than the projected falls. Those for spending on infrastructure and pharmaceutical benefits are creative accounting. The tougher criteria for the disability pension won’t withstand the rise in the age pension age to 67, nor any economic downturn.

And, of course, the huge saving in public administrative spending assumes that after more than a decade of annual cuts to staffing costs, the “efficiency dividend” can roll for another four years without any noticeable loss of efficiency.

The Coalition’s rule that ministers proposing new spending programs must also propose equivalent savings from within their portfolio seems to do most to explain the low real growth in spending overall.

But this, too, is a discipline that will be ever-harder to sustain for a further decade. The way Morrison is dishing out dollars to fix political pressure points, it’s likely to take a beating just between now and the election.

What worries me is the way Treasury and Finance’s approach to spending control is so old-school, so blunt-instrument, so hand-to-mouth, so no-brainer.

Just Say No. Just tell every department to find savings, and cut their admin costs by yet another 2.5 per cent, then look the other way while they make short-term savings at the expense of our future.

Treasury and Finance see spending control as an act of being tough and unreasoning and opportunist, not one involving any science or learning or expertise.

It’s as though, stuck on a sheep run in the middle of NSW, obsessing about macro-economic management, they’ve been oblivious to the advances in spending control techniques made by applied micro-economists at universities around Australia.

There’s the campaign of Dr Richard Tooth (from a consulting firm) for price signals to encourage better driving, there’s Professor Bruce Chapman’s invention of the income-contingent loan which, as Professor Linda Botterill keeps saying, could be applied to drought loans and much else.

There’s all the work health economists put into the developing case-mix funding of hospitals, and the unending stream of smart suggestions coming from the nation’s leading health economist, Dr Stephen Duckett, of the Grattan Institute.

Then there’s former professor Andrew Leigh’s championing of using randomised control trials to discover what spending works and what doesn’t, there’s more rigorous and transparent use of benefit-cost analysis to evaluate infrastructure projects, there’s greater use of “behavioural insights” teams, there’s more emphasis on preventive medicine and there’s exploiting the long-term budgetary savings offered by greater investment in early childhood development.

Now, many of these advances have been taken up, at least in some modest way. But, to my knowledge, because they’ve been pushed by other people, not because Treasury and Finance have shown much interest. They’re asleep at the wheel.

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Never mind carbon, let’s put a price on bad driving

What would an economist know about road safety? More than you’d think. Certainly, more than the road safety establishment thinks.

Or maybe they just don’t want to disturb the insurance companies’ nice little earner from compulsory third-party car insurance.

The economist in question is Dr Richard Tooth, a consultant with Sapere Research Group, who’s been working for some years on his pet project of using economics to reduce the road toll (with, at one point, some funding from Austroads, the peak body representing road transport agencies).

Over the decades we’ve had much success in using seat belts, random breath testing and safer cars to bring down the road toll.

But we seem to have run out of ideas. The national death toll has started going back up. Last year 1226 people lost their lives on Australia’s roads.

The newly released report of the inquiry into national road safety for the coming decade (which says little about insurance) reminds us that at least another 36,000 people are admitted to hospital each year.

“Often these are life-changing injuries, such as paralysis, brain injuries, amputations or loss of sight,” it says.

Tooth thinks there’s an obvious improvement we could make that wouldn’t cost much more initially, and would actually save money once it started affecting people’s driving habits. It’s to base a driver’s annual motor vehicle insurance premium on how risky their driving is.

Viewed the way economists see things, there are two key problems. As behavioural economists (and social psychologists) have long known, humans tend to be overconfident.

Almost all of us think we’re good drivers, it’s just those other drivers that are causing the problem.

The second problem is that, when we drive badly and cause accidents, we don’t bear the full cost of the damage we do. Economists call the part we don’t pay for ourselves a “negative externality”.

And if someone else is paying, why should we worry? Economists call this “moral hazard”.

Insurance is obviously a good idea, a way of sharing risk. Those people whose house didn’t burn down make a small contribution to the cost of building a new house for the person whose did.

The downside of all insurance, however, is moral hazard. Why should I worry much about ensuring my house doesn’t burn down, it’s insured?

Insurers have ways – usually fairly primitive – of trying to reduce moral hazard. Say, you get a discount on your premium if you have smoke alarms fitted. And on other insurance policies there’s a “deductable”, where you bear the first part of the claim yourself. And, of course, the no-claim bonus.

With car insurance, however, a lot of the cost of accidents is borne by neither the insurance company nor the policy holder. A fair bit is borne by the general taxpayer – the need to maintain many traffic police, ambulances and hospital emergency departments.

But the biggest “cost” is one that’s hard to measure in dollars but is very real: the grief, pain and suffering caused by avoidable deaths and disablement.

Whatever price we put on a human life, it’s safe to assume it would be a whole lot higher than $200,000 – which is what Tooth says is the average cost paid via insurance.

He’s concerned that our system of dividing highly regulated compulsory third-party insurance (which covers injury to people) off from general vehicle insurance (which covers damage to property, plus other things such as theft) makes it hard to give drivers a greater monetary incentive to avoid driving riskily.

With a few exceptions, the state-government run CTP schemes charge people a flat premium that bears no relationship to how carefully they drive. Which, when you think about it (as an economist would), means the schemes effectively tax the low-risk drivers so as to subsidise the high-risk drivers.

That, of course, is the wrong way round if we’re trying to discourage rather than encourage risky driving. And that’s Tooth’s point.

He says we should do what most other advanced countries do and allow insurance companies to offer policies that cover third-party bodily injury in a package with property damage and other risks. The CTP component could remain compulsory and the other components remain voluntary.

This would allow the companies to charge premiums based on the individual’s assessed risk of having an accident, as is happening increasingly in Britain. It would better align insurance companies’ motivation to reduce claims with the community’s desire to reduce road death and injury.

It would mean higher premiums for drivers who were young - or very old. But technological advances have made it possible to assess risk more accurately than just via the driver’s age.

People using “advanced driver assistance systems”, such as autonomous emergency braking, would pay less. Young people driving cars with such assistance systems would get bigger discounts than older drivers.

And then there’s “telematics”, such as onboard devices that record the way a car has been driven – hard braking, swerving and so forth. Such UBI – usage-based insurance – is very big in Britain.

According to Tooth, research shows this can reduce crash risk by at least 20 per cent overall, and by up to 40 per cent among young drivers.

He believes risk-based insurance premiums can influence whether people drive (young people may delay becoming drivers, with ride-sharing apps helping this choice), what they drive (safer cars or cars with added assistance systems) and how and when they drive.

But Tooth would like us to go one better than the Brits (and anyone else). The government could “internalise the externality” of the intangible costs of death and disablement on society by imposing a commensurate charge on insurance companies, which they would pass on to customers having accidents in which they’re at fault.

The government could use the proceeds to build safer roads or for some other worthy cause. The real purpose of such a tax would be to encourage people to avoid it by driving more carefully.

Is this ringing any bells? Putting a price on bad driving follows the same logic as putting a price on carbon.

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Aged care abuses the latest of many economic mistakes

How will the era of “neoliberalism” end – with a bang or a whimper? With a royal commission – or three. But don’t worry. Royal commissions always make a lot of noise.

With the memory of the government’s embarrassing delay in yielding to public pressure for a royal commission into banking still fresh, Scott Morrison got in before the Four Corners expose to announce a royal commission into aged care.

Who’s to say this will be the last? A royal commission into electricity and gas prices is mooted. Maybe sometime in the future we'll see a royal commission into problems with the National Disability Insurance Scheme.

To Morrison, the aged care commission has the advantage of kicking a political hot potato into the long grass of the next parliamentary term. “How can you claim we’re doing nothing? We’ve called an inquiry.”

Actually, the neglect and mistreatment of old people in nursing homes has been the subject of so many inquiries and reports – going back to the kerosene baths in 1997 – that only an inquiry of the status of a royal commission could have satisfied the many complainants.

But I wonder if the increasing resort to royal commissions has a deeper economic and political significance.

A key part of the era of what we used to call “micro-economic reform” has been to take services formerly provided by governments – and sometimes charities – and pay profit-making businesses to provide them.

Among the first of these “outsourcing” schemes was the Howard government’s decision to abolish the Commonwealth Employment Service and contract a network of charitable and for-profit firms to help the jobless find work.

Then came the expansion of childcare to for-profit providers, the move by successive federal and state governments to make technical and further education “contestable” by private providers, and the decision to open the provision of aged care to for-profit providers.

Plus the decision to turn five state electricity monopolies into a single, competitive national electricity market.

The reformers were sure these changes would lead to big improvements. As everyone knows, the public sector is lazy and wasteful, whereas competition and the profit motive make the private sector very efficient.

The reform would allow governments to reduce their spending on the services they subsidised, even while the public got better service. Competition from private providers would oblige church and charitable providers to lift their game.

And introducing market forces meant the providers of government-subsidised services didn’t need to be closely regulated. As any economics textbook tells you, it would be irrational for providers to mistreat their customers because they’d soon lose them to their many rivals.

It hasn’t worked out the way the reformers hoped. We won’t know whether non-government provision of job-search services is working well until unemployment surges in the next recession. But we do know that childcare was thrown into crisis when one private provider, ABC Learning, which had been allowed to acquire about half the nation’s childcare centres, went belly up.

We know that making vocational education and training “contestable” was a costly disaster, as many private providers conned youngsters into signing up for unsuitable courses (and debt).

We know that turning electricity from government monopolies to a national market has seen the retail cost of power double in a decade.

And now it’s aged care where mounting complaints about neglect and abuse can no longer be fobbed off.

Providers have been required to make public so little evidence of staffing ratios and other indicators of performance that we don’t yet know whether neglect and abuse is greater among for-profit or non-profit providers.

The notorious Oakden nursing home in South Australia, after all, was state-government run. But our experience of private operators gaming government subsidies and cutting quality to increase profits in other areas of outsourcing makes me think I know where the greatest problems lie.

And the way the announcement of the commission prompted steep falls in the share prices of four aged-care companies listed on the stock exchange suggests investors share my suspicions.

According to research by the Tax Justice Network, if you measure it by number of beds, non-profit providers make up about half the “market”, with the six biggest for-profit providers accounting for more than 20 per cent.

The biggest is Bupa (owned by a British mutual), followed by Opal (part owned by AMP), Regis, Estia and Japara (all ASX listed), and Allity.

We do know that the number of serious-risk notices given to providers jumped by 170 per cent in the past financial year, and significant non-compliance increased by 292 per cent. This says there’s been a sudden increase not in misbehaviour, but in vigilance by the authorities.

Why are unannounced visits and compliance audits only now in vogue? Good question.

Aged care is just the latest instance of the failure of contestability and “marketisation” to deliver government services satisfactorily – a great embarrassment to econocrats and governments of both colours.

The chickens are coming home to roost and the uproar is threatening the Coalition’s survival. Calling a royal commission with all its shock revelations may be the answer to the politicians’ problem.

It changes the question from “how could you have been so naive as to believe competition would save customers from being abused?” to “what are you doing to punish these bastards and stop it happening?”.

It also tells generous donors to party coffers the government's had no choice but to let them go.

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Long way to go to get banks back in their box

Have we learnt from the mistakes of the global financial crisis, now 10 years ago? Yes, but not nearly as much as we should have.

Of course, the answer is different for the Americans and the other major advanced economies to what it is for us, who managed to avoid bank failures and the Great Recession.

Globally, much has been done under the Basel rules to strengthen requirements for banks to hold more capital and liquidity, reducing the likelihood of them getting themselves into difficulties.

It would be naive, however, to imagine this has eliminated the possibility of any future financial crisis. Recurring financial crises are a feature of capitalist economies through the centuries.

All we can do is work on reducing their frequency and severity. On that score, the rich countries could have done a better job of rationalising the division of responsibility between the various buck-passing authorities supposed to be regulating their financial system.

The root cause of the GFC was ideological: the belief that the more lightly regulated the banks and other financial players were, the better they’d serve the wider economy’s interests, allied with the belief that their greater freedom wouldn’t tempt them to take excessive risks because that would be contrary to their interests.

Wrong. This badly misread the perverse incentives bank executives faced – heads I win big bonuses; tails my shareholders do their dough – and the way the heat of competition can induce business people to do things they know they shouldn’t, not to mention the “moral hazard” of knowing that, should the worst come to the worst, the government will have no choice but to bail us out.

As actually happened. In the North Atlantic economies, politicians and central bankers did the right thing in rescuing failing banks. Had they not, the whole financial system would have collapsed and the loss of wealth and employment would have been many times greater than it was.

But don’t try telling that to a public that watched governments racking up billions in debt to save banks and bankers, who then proceeded to turn out on the street people who could no longer afford the mortgages they should never have been granted.

The US authorities’ mistake was failing to draw a clear distinction between saving banks to protect their customers and stop the system collapsing, and punishing the failed banks’ managers and shareholders for screwing up.

Why didn’t they? In short, because the banks are too powerful politically.

Which brings us to Australia’s response to the GFC and how we escaped the Great Recession. Our big banks didn’t fall over because our econocrats never believed the banks wouldn’t be silly enough to take risks that could endanger their survival. Our banks didn’t buy toxic assets because our prudential supervisors wouldn’t let ‘em.

That didn’t stop the GFC dealing a blow to business and consumer confidence, such that real gross domestic product contracted by 0.5 per cent in December quarter 2008. That we avoided recession is thanks to the quick action of the Reserve Bank in slashing interest rates and the Rudd government in applying huge fiscal stimulus, which stopped the economy unravelling.

At another level, however, the econocrats did believe the banks should be lightly regulated in their relations with customers, and could be trusted not to mistreat them. Outfits such as the Australian Securities and Investments Commission had their funding cut and were given the nod not to be overactive.

The absence of a crash meant our governments didn’t learn that, in the non-textbook world, market forces can cause, as well as limit, the mistreatment of customers. Our own banks’ great political influence reinforced this naivety, prompting governments to wave aside the mounting evidence of bank misconduct and the public’s mounting disquiet and distrust.

So, in a sense, the banking royal commission is the product of our earlier failure to learn what we should have from the GFC.

But there’s a much broader lesson we’ve yet to learn from the crisis, one that applies to all the advanced economies. It’s that the banking and “financial services” sector is far bigger than we need, is bloated by rent-seeking, involves many times more trading between banks (a form of gambling) than trading between banks and real-economy customers, and is thus a waste of economic resources.

When financial services’ share of our economy (and most other advanced countries’) was expanding rapidly in the decades preceding the crisis, economists told us we were benefiting from financial innovation and advances in the management of financial risk.

The GFC revealed that rationale as about 95 per cent bulldust. To misquote Keynes, the economy would be better off if most of the people making big bucks in finance got useful jobs such as being dentists.

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Morrison optimistic we’ll get much bracket creep

The mystery revealed. Consider this: how does the Morrison government cut income and company taxes and avoid big cuts in government spending, but still project ever-rising budget surpluses and ever-falling net public debt over the next decade?

With publication of the Parliamentary Budget Office’s report on the May budget’s medium-term projections, we now know. Short answer: by assuming loads more bracket creep between now and then.

You may remember that, at the time of budget, I was highly critical of the rosy forecasts and assumptions used in the budget’s “forward estimates” from 2018-19 to 2021-22, and then in its “medium-term projections” out for a further seven years to 2028-29.

They showed the budget’s underlying cash balance returning to a tiny surplus in 2019-20, then the surplus growing steadily to about 1.3 per cent of gross domestic product by the end of the decade.

As a consequence, the government’s net debt would peak in June this year at 18.6 per cent of GDP, then fall sharply to just 3 per cent in 2028-29 as the annual surpluses were used to repay debt.

There you go. Big cuts in company tax and a plan for three cuts in income tax, but we’ll soon be back in the black and eliminating the debt. I thought then it sounded too good to be true.

The budget office, which is independent of the government, is required by its Act to accept the government’s forecasts and macro-economy assumptions for its projections. But the budget papers gave no details of how, according to the government’s projections, the budget surplus would grow from 0.8 per cent of GDP in 2021-22 to 1.3 per cent in 2028-29.

This is what the office’s report tells us. It does so using its own modelling of each of the main taxes and 23 big spending programs, while sticking to the government’s macro-economy assumptions.

The report’s projections show total receipts ending the seven years where they began, at 25.5 per cent of GDP, while total spending grows more slowly than GDP so that it falls from 24.7 per cent to 24.1 per cent.

This implies that all the projected improvement in the budget surplus is expected to come from many years of amazingly disciplined spending restraint. But such a conclusion misses an obvious question: how can total receipts stay growing as fast as the economy is projected to grow when the government is planning to cut the rate of company tax by a sixth (from 30 to 25 per cent) and have three cuts in income tax?

Ah, that’s the report’s big reveal. Its projections show company tax collections declining as a proportion of GDP and “other receipts” also declining, but with this being exactly offset by the growth in income tax collections.

And that would be made possible by the fiscal magic of bracket creep. Remember bracket creep? It was the justification for the tax cuts and, according to then-treasurer Scott Morrison, the tax cuts would “eliminate bracket creep for the middle class”.

Or not. Turns out, according to the report’s projections, there’ll be so much continuing bracket creep as to more than wipe out the benefit from the promised tax cuts.

Taken over the full 10 years – and remembering that the first of the tax cuts began in July this year - income tax collections are projected to rise from 11.2 per cent to 12.5 per cent as a proportion of GDP, a huge jump of 1.3 percentage points.

Over the same decade, the average tax rate across all taxpayers is projected to rise from 22.9¢ in every dollar to 25.2¢. But here’s another important revelation by the report: some people do much better from the tax cuts than others, while bracket creep doesn’t affect everyone equally, either.

The report ranks everyone paying income tax according to their income, then divides them into five groups of about 2.9 million each - “quintiles” – from lowest to highest. It then looks at the way the average tax rate in each quintile is affected by the tax cut and by bracket creep. It looks at the change from 2017-18 to 2026-27.

On average, the three-stage tax plan will cut the average tax rate paid by people in the bottom quintile by just 0.3¢ in the dollar. Those in the second and third quintiles will save 0.9¢, while those in the fourth quintile save 1.1¢ and those in the top quintile save 2.1¢ in every dollar.

(This, BTW, is the proof that the three-stage tax plan does change the progressive income tax scale in a regressive direction, making it significantly less progressive.)

Now, the effect of bracket creep (before allowing for the tax cuts). It raises the bottom quintile’s average tax rate by 1.1¢ in the dollar, then the second and third’s by 5.4¢, but the fourth’s by 3.7¢ and the top quintile’s by just 2.9¢ in the dollar.

Leaving aside the bottom quintile (where most people rely on benefits and earn little income), the big net losers - bracket creep less tax cut – are those in the second and third quintiles. That is, those earning between 30 percentage points below the median income and 10 points above it.

Another name for such people is “low to middle income-earners” – the very people Morrison claimed his cuts were aimed at helping most.

But before you get too steamed up, remember that the budget office is merely exposing the previously hidden implications of the government’s medium-term projection and the rosy assumptions it depends on.

The key assumptions are “above-trend economic growth for much of the period” – which contains a hidden assumption that our record of 27 years without a severe recession will roll on for another 10 – and, in particular, “a return to trend wage growth”.

That is, it will take only a few years before wages are back to growing by 3.5 per cent a year – a percentage point faster than prices – and will stay growing that fast for the duration.

It’s this strong wage growth that does most to produce the bracket creep. So, if you’re not as optimistic about wages grow, you don’t need to be as concerned about bracket creep. By the same token, however, we wouldn’t be making as much progress reducing public debt.

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There are delusions for young and old

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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