THE GLOBAL ECONOMY

Aurora College Economics HSC Study Day, Sydney

Every year there’s some event in the news that’s relevant to your study of the global economy, and this year it’s the growing realisation that the process of globalisation has stopped and begun to reverse – “deglobalisation”. The pandemic hasn’t helped, nor has the invasion of Ukraine, but it’s the increasing tension between the US and China that has raised the spectre of the world being divided into two rival trading blocs. It’s likely the value of world trade will fall in 2023.

The arrival of the pandemic in early 2020 led to an immediate fall in world trade, but it recovered sharply the following year. However, the disruption to the supply of many imported goods has led some countries and companies to “re-shore” their supply chains, by producing more goods and components at home rather than abroad. While making their supply more reliable, this will raise the cost of those products. For some, this has just been the latest excuse for protection against competition from imports. The IMF has argued that supply chains can be diversified – made reliant on a wider range of foreign suppliers – without losing the benefits from trade.

The invasion of Ukraine has disrupted the supply of oil and gas from Russia to many European economies, as well as the supply of wheat and other foodstuffs to developing countries. This has happened not so much because of the war as because of the trade sanctions imposed on Russia by the US and its many allies. As the war drags on, the Europeans and others move to alternative suppliers, a process known as “friend-shoring” – moving your trade to countries you get on with, not necessarily those offering the best prices or service.

America’s swing to protectionism

For many decades, the US was the great champion of free trade and rules-based trading under the GATT – the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade – and its successor, the World Trade Organisation. It was the support of the US that allowed China to become a member of the WTO in 2001, leading to huge growth in international trade and globalisation. Much manufacturing activity moved to China from the developed economies, leading to decades of lower prices for manufactured goods throughout the world, and the accelerated growth of the Chinese economy. But it also led to much unemployment for displaced factory workers in the US. While all consumers benefited from the cheaper imports, far too little was done to help those workers find employment elsewhere. This was the grass-roots cause of America’s swing to protectionism.

President Donald Trump won election in 2016 on a promise of protecting American industry against “unfair” competition from developing countries and, in particular, China. He launched a trade war with China, made changes to various trade agreements, and refused to join a US-sponsored trade agreement with Japan, Australia and various other Asian economies (which went ahead anyway). What’s now apparent is that US protectionism, and the trade war with China, have continued under President Joe Biden. He has resorted to subsidies and export controls, contrary to WTO rules.

It's now clear the US is motivated not just by protectionism, but also big-power rivalry with China. America is unwilling to share power with the rising superpower, China. It is particularly unwilling to have China overtake it as leader in advances in digital technology. When politicians and officials say they are worried about the effect of “geostrategic conflict” on world trade, this is what they mean. When they worry about the “fragmentation” of world trade, they mean they fear the world could divide into two rival trading blocs, led by America and China. This would involve great losses of the “gains from trade” through pursuit of “comparative advantage”. In October 2022, the US imposed sweeping restrictions on exports of semiconductors (chips), aimed at preventing China from advancing technologically. This also explains America’s efforts to stop Huawei and TikTok from expanding outside China.

Definition

The OECD defines globalisation as “the economic integration of different countries through growing freedom of movement across national borders of goods, services, capital, ideas and people”.

That’s a good definition, but I like my own: globalisation is the process by which the natural and government-created barriers between national economies are broken down.

Globalisation’s two driving forces

With this definition I’m trying to make a few points. One is that globalisation has had two quite different driving forces. The one we hear most about is the decisions of governments around the world to break down the barriers they have created to limit flows of goods and money between countries by reducing their protection of domestic industries and by deregulating their financial markets and floating their currencies.

But the second factor promoting globalisation is just as important, if not more so: advances in technology – including advances in telecommunications, digitisation and the internet, which have hugely reduced the cost of moving information and news around the world, as well as increasing the speed of its movement. This has allowed a huge increase in trade in digitised services. As well, advances in shipping – containerisation, bigger and more fuel-efficient ships – and in air transport have led to increased movement of goods and people between countries.  

Globalisation is a process

Another point my definition makes is that globalisation is a process, not a set state of being. Because it’s a process, it can go forward – the world can become more globalised – or it can go backwards, as national governments, under pressure from their electorates, seek to stop or even reverse the process of economic integration. Among the advocates of globalisation there tended to be an assumption that the process of ever greater integration was inevitable and inexorable. That was always a mistaken notion.

Earlier globalisation

The process of globalisation is and always was reversible. People should know this because this isn’t the first time the process of globalisation has occurred and then been rolled back. The decades leading up to World War I saw reduced barriers and greatly increased flows of goods, funds and people between the old world of Europe and the new world of America, Australia and other countries. But this integration was brought to a halt in 1914 by the onset of a world war. And the period of beggar-thy-neighbour increases in trade protection, to which countries resorted in response to the Great Depression of the early 1930s, greatly increased the barriers between national economies. Indeed, in the years after World War II, the many rounds of multilateral tariff reductions brought about under the GATT – the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, which has since become the World Trade Organisation – were intended to dismantle all the barriers to trade built up in the period between the wars.

The era of hyperglobalisation

The period between the end of World War II in 1945 and the late 1980s saw huge growth in trade between the advanced economies, as a consequence of those successive rounds of tariff reductions. But from the late ’80s until the global financial crisis and Great Recession of 2008 there was a period of “hyperglobalisation” in which trade between the developed and developing countries grew hugely. This was partly because of the way the digital revolution and other technological change broke down the natural barriers between countries. But also the result of the eighth and final “Uruguay round” of the GATT in 1994 reducing tariff and other trade barriers between the developed and developing countries.  Many poor countries joined the new WTO at this time, with China joining in 2001.

One measure of the extent of globalisation is the growth in two-way trade between countries (exports plus imports) as a proportion of gross world product (world GDP). Between 1990 and 2008, global trade rose from 39 pc to 61 pc of GWP – the period of rapid globalisation.

Note that the poor countries did well out of the quarter-century of rapid globalisation. Between 1995 and 2019, real GDP per person in the emerging economies more than doubled, whereas in the advanced economies it grew by only 44 pc (after allowing for differences in purchasing power).

The era of deglobalisation

But the end of hyperglobalisation can be dated to the global financial crisis in 2008, and the new era of “deglobalisation” has continued during the pandemic. Two-way trade as a proportion GWP fell after the global financial crisis, and even by 2019 had not regained its peak in 2008.

Among the signs of deglobalisation are Britain’s vote in 2016 to leave the European Union – Brexit – and thus to reduce its degree of economic integration with the rest of Europe – a decision most outsiders see as involving a significant economic cost to the Brits’ economy. Second, the Trump administration withdrew from the Trans Pacific Partnership, an agreement between the US and 11 other selected countries (including Australia) to reduce barriers to trade between them – although the remaining 11 finalised an agreement without the US.  Third, the Trump administration withdrew from the Paris global agreement on reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Fourth, Trump launched a trade war with China. President Biden has re-joined the Paris agreement and repaired America’s relations with its allies, but continues the contest with China.

The temptation of returning to protectionism

The period of hyperglobalisation saw the shift of much manufacturing from the rich countries (including Australia) to China and other developing countries with cheaper labour. But it’s likely that, in the period of slower growth that followed the global financial crisis, some countries yielded to the temptation to return to protecting their domestic industries against foreign competition, returning to the (failed) strategy of growth through “import replacement” rather than “export-led” growth. Regrettably, this trend is being led by the two biggest developing economies, China and India. China raised its import barriers against many Australian exports, but is now lowering them.

This trend has continued during the pandemic, with The Economist magazine reporting that countries have passed more than 140 special trade restrictions during the pandemic. Some of these may arise from concerns in the rich countries during the pandemic over the lack of availability of personal protective equipment, or vaccines. Worries about the pandemic’s disruption of global supply chains may be another reason for the return of protectionist attitudes in the advanced economies.

The channels of globalisation

The four main economic channels through which the world’s economies have become more integrated are:

1) Trade in goods and services

2) Finance and investment

3) Labour

4) Information, news and ideas.

Trade is probably the channel that gets most attention from the public. Donald Trump’s populist campaigning against globalisation focused on the belief that America’s greater openness to trade – particularly with developing countries – caused it to lose many jobs, particularly in manufacturing, as cheaper imports caused many domestic producers to lose sales, or as factories have been moved offshore to countries where wages are lower, without America receiving anything much in return.

Surprisingly, financial globalisation didn’t get as much blame as it could have for the global financial crisis and the Great Recession it precipitated. Most countries have not liberalised the flow of labour into their economy in the way they have the other factors of production.

Income distribution and the gains from trade

One of economists’ core beliefs is that there are mutual gains from trade. Provided the exchange of goods is voluntary, each side participates only because it sees some advantage for itself. This is undoubtedly true, but in the era of renewed globalisation we’ve been reminded that, though the gains may be mutual, they are not necessarily equal. Some countries do better than others.

Similarly, the benefits to a particular country from its trade aren’t necessarily equally distributed between the people within that country. When, for example, a country imports more of its manufactured goods because they are cheaper than its locally made goods, all the consumers who buy those goods are better off (including all the working people), but many workers in the domestic manufacturing industry may lose their jobs.

Another factor that has been working in the same direction is digitisation and other technological change which, in its effect on employers’ demand for labour, seems to be “skill-biased” – that is, it tends to increase the value of highly skilled labour, while reducing the value of less-skilled labour. It seems likely that, between them, trade and technological advance have worked to shift the distribution of income in America, Britain and, to a lesser extent, Australia, in favour of high-income families and against many middle and lower-income families.

The unwelcome surprise many politicians and economists have received from the high protest votes for Brexit, Trump and One Nation is causing them to wonder if too little has been done to assist the workers and regions adversely affected to retrain and relocate, and too little to ensure the winners from structural change bear most of the cost of this assistance.

Shares of the World Economy, 2021

GWP Exports Population

China          19   13     18

United States   16     9         4

Euro area (19 countries)   12   26         4

India     7     2       18

Japan     4     3         2

Advanced economies (40) 42   61       14

Developing economies (156) 58   39       86

            100 100     100

Source: IMF WEO statistical appendix; GWP based on purchasing power parity                

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Grim Reaper is catching up with the Baby Boomers, waving bills

Having witnessed the last days of my parents and in-laws, I don’t delude myself – as they did – that I’ll be able to avoid being carted off to an old people’s home. Sorry, an aged care residential facility.

Actually, I dream of dying in the saddle. My last, half-finished column would be the announcement that I’d finally made way for the bright young women coming up behind me. That’s assuming they hadn’t already found a chance to push me under a bus.

Speaking of bright young women, Anthony Albanese’s Minister for Aged Care and Sport, Anika Wells, seems to be attacking her job with much more enthusiasm than her Coalition predecessors.

In a speech to the National Press Club last week, she noted that Labor inherited a system that a royal commission had characterised with a single word – “neglect”. She’d spent the past 12 months engaged in “triage” and “urgent reform” and was now able to think about the future.

And what’s she been thinking? “I don’t want Australians to be scared about the care they will be provided in later life,” she said. “I don’t want daughters and sons worried about the treatment their parents will receive.”

The Howard government’s Aged Care Act of 1997 was aimed at saving money by turning aged care over to community and for-profit providers. It was focused on how the providers were to run their services, setting out their obligations and responsibilities.

But, as recommended by the royal commission, the government planned to introduce a new act next year, this time focused on the rights of older people, with “a clear statement that the care provided to residents is safe and of high quality”.

Labor had already done much to fix the system, she said, but there were more challenges ahead, and “we must act now”. Why? Because “the Baby Boomers are coming”. (I’d have thought they’d come some time ago, and the real problem was their looming departure.)

But I imagine the Boomers (present company excepted) will be living a lot longer than previous generations – thanks to advances in medical science and being the first generation to realise that exercise was something to be sought and enjoyed, not avoided.

But though their arrival in aged care may be at a later age, their later lives won’t be trouble-free and certainly not doctor-free.

One change we’ll be seeing is more in-home care. Almost everyone would prefer to keep living at home rather than go off to a “facility” (sounds like a toilet block). The previous government did introduce the home-care package, but it was expensive and so was limited in how many people were given it.

Wells is introducing a new Support at Home program in July 2025 which, by delaying or eliminating people’s move to facility care, should save money.

But her big announcement last week was the setting up of an aged care taskforce – chaired by her good self – to answer the royal commission’s “great unanswered question”: How to make aged care equitable and sustainable into the future?

Which is a politician’s way of saying, “How we gonna pay for all this?”

One of the commissioners wanted a new aged care tax levy of 1 per cent of everyone’s taxable income (which, in practice, would be added to the present 2 per cent Medicare levy), whereas the other wanted some unspecified combination of a levy and a means-tested contribution from users.

Wells notes that, within a decade, we’ll have, for the first time ever, more people aged over 65 than under 18. And the proportion of people aged 15 to 64 – the people working and paying income tax – will shrink.

Now, this is the point where we need to remember that we’ve gone for decades stacking the financial rules against the younger generation and in favour of the oldies. We’ve kept handing tax breaks to the ageing. Old people can have good incomes that are largely untaxed, whereas young people on the same money have to pay up - and pay for their tertiary education.

It’s not true that every Boomer’s rolling in it – there are poor people in every generation – but most have done pretty well. Most were able to climb aboard the home-ownership gravy train when homes were still affordable. Many have been able to buy an investment property or two on the top.

And though the compulsory superannuation scheme hasn’t applied to the whole of their working lives, they’ll be retiring with a lot more, hugely taxpayer-subsidised super than any previous generation.

So, the idea of spreading the entire cost of the Boomers’ aged care – whether in-home or in-facility – across all those people young enough to still be working and paying income tax ought to be unthinkable.

If Labor doesn’t summon the courage to ask those Baby Boomers who’ve done OK to help pay directly for the cost of their highly privileged lives’ last stage, it will just prove what a rotten world Albo and the rest of us have left our offspring.

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Economy close to stalling, as Reserve hits the brakes yet again

It’s been a puzzling week, as we learnt the economy had slowed almost to stalling speed, just a day after the Reserve Bank raised interest rates for the 12th time, and warned there may be more.

According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ “national accounts”, real gross domestic product – the economy’s production of goods and services – grew by just 0.2 per cent over the three months to the end of March.

That took growth over the year to March down to 2.3 per cent, which sounds better than it is because the economy has slowed so rapidly. If it continued growing by 0.2 per cent a quarter, that would be annual growth of 0.8 per cent.

And the resumption of immigration means the population is now growing faster than the economy. Allow for population growth and GDP per person actually fell by 0.2 per cent. Over the year to March, it grew by only 0.3 per cent.

While a growing population is good for businesses – they have more potential customers – to everyone else, economic growth has been sold to us as raising our material standard of living. Not much chance of that if GDP per person is falling.

The Reserve Bank has been trying to slow the economy down because demand for goods and services has been growing faster than the economy’s ability to supply them, thus allowing businesses to increase their prices.

With additional help from the rising prices of imported goods and services, the rate of inflation has shot up. It’s started falling back from its peak of 7.8 per cent at the end of last year, but is still way above the Reserve’s 2 per cent to 3 per cent target range.

The Reserve’s been raising the interest rates paid by the third of households with mortgages, to reduce their ability to spend on other things. But, at this stage, probably the biggest dampener on consumer spending is coming from the failure of wages to keep up with rising prices.

“Demand” means spending, so if households find it harder to spend on goods and services, that makes it harder for businesses to raise their prices, thus bringing the inflation rate back down.

And remember that the full effect of all the interest rate rises we’ve seen is still to be felt. The pain will increase over the rest of this year.

But if I were Reserve Bank governor Dr Philip Lowe, I wouldn’t be too worried that the plan wasn’t working. The biggest single factor driving GDP is consumer spending, which accounts for more than half of all spending. In the June quarter last year, it grew by 2.2 per cent.

The following quarter its growth fell to 0.8 per cent, then 0.3 per cent, and now 0.2 per cent. Wow. I think the squeeze is working.

Although more people have been working more hours, real household disposable income fell by 0.3 per cent in the quarter, and by 4 per cent over the year to March.

It was hit by the failure of wages to rise in line with prices, by the doubling in households’ interest payments, and by the bigger bite that income tax took out of pay rises, caused by bracket creep.

How did households manage to keep their consumption spending growing despite their falling real income? By cutting the proportion of their income that they were saving from more than 11 per cent in March quarter last year to less than 4 per cent this March quarter – the lowest it’s been in about 15 years.

Household investment spending on newly built homes and alterations fell by 1.2 per cent, its sixth fall in seven quarters.

One bright spot was growth in business spending during the quarter of 2.9 per cent, led by spending on machinery and equipment, and non-dwelling construction – particularly on renewables and electricity infrastructure.

Unfortunately, much of the machinery investment was on imported equipment that had been delayed by the pandemic, so it’s not a sign of continuing strength. The volume of spending on imports was a super-strong 3.2 per cent, but imports subtract from GDP, of course.

Treasurer Jim Chalmers always blames the economy’s slowdown on higher interest rates (blame the Reserve, not me), high inflation (not me either) and “a slowing global economy” (blame the rest of the world).

A slowing global economy? Yes, of course. Everyone’s heard about that. Trouble is, the main way the rest of the world affects us is by buying – or not buying – our exports. And the volume of our exports grew by 1.8 per cent in the March quarter, and 10.8 per cent over the year to March. That’s because our miners have done so well (and our fossil-fuel-using households and businesses so badly) out of the higher world coal and gas prices caused by the Ukraine war.

Even so, this quarter’s growth in export volumes of 1.8 per cent has been swamped by the 3.2 per cent growth in import volumes, meaning that “net exports” – exports minus imports – subtracted 0.2 percentage points from the overall growth in real GDP during the quarter.

After Lowe’s decision on Tuesday to raise rates yet again, Chalmers wasn’t mincing his words. “I do expect that there will be a lot of Australians who find this decision difficult to understand and difficult to cop – ordinary working Australians are already bearing the brunt of these interest rate rises, they shouldn’t bear the blame too,” he said.

“The Reserve Bank’s job is to quash inflation without crashing the economy, and they will have a lot of time and opportunities to explain and defend the decision that they’ve taken today.”

Lowe has said repeatedly that he’s seeking the “narrow path” where “inflation returns to target within a reasonable timeframe, while the economy continues to grow, and we hold on to as many of the gains in the labour market [our return to full employment] as we can”.

After seeing the next day’s GDP figures, Paul Bloxham of HSBC bank observed that the narrow path “is looking extremely narrow indeed”. True.

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Consumerism and social status keep our noses to the grindstone

What better time to think about whether we’re working too hard than while we’re enjoying a Monday off, thanks to a public holiday? Wouldn’t it be nice if every weekend could be a long weekend?

Actually, almost 100 years ago, the greatest economist of the 20th century, John Maynard Keynes, pretty much predicted that’s the way we’d be living by now.

In his essay Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, written in 1930, he envisaged that by now, we’d be able to live comfortably while having to work only 15 hours a week. We could work just three hours each weekday, or clock up our 15 hours in just a few days – say, three five-hour days.

Really? What a duffer. How could anyone so smart be so disastrously wrong?

Well, not quite. What Keynes was saying was that, technological advance – the invention of ever-better labour-saving machines – would increase the productivity of our labour to such an extent that, by now, we wouldn’t need to work very hard to be able to live comfortably.

His point was that, as we’re able to produce more goods and services per hour of work, we become better off. We can take that benefit either as enjoying an unchanged material standard of living while working fewer hours a week, or as higher monetary income – thus allowing us to buy more stuff – while working the same number of hours.

As Jan Behringer and other economists from Germany’s University of Duisburg-Essen have written, in the years since Keynes made that prediction the productivity of labour in the developed economies has improved by more than he expected.

So, we could have been working a 15-hour week had we chosen to but, in fact, we chose to take the money and the extra stuff rather than the extra leisure. Working hours have fallen since the 1930s, but not by all that much.

Behringer and colleagues say the “obstacles to more leisure time are primarily sociopolitical in nature” – by which they mean it’s not purely economic reasons, the shortage of resources, that require us to work more.

I’ve no doubt it has suited the rich and powerful to have us working and spending rather than devoting four days a week to developing our hobbies. That way, the rich and powerful get more so.

But, by the same token, I think the rest of us have been easily seduced by the lure of the materialist, consumer culture. We love buying things that are new, shinier and do better tricks.

In Australia – and in Europe, but less so in America – pretty much all the reductions in working hours, the increases in annual leave and sick leave, and the introduction of that strange animal, long service leave, have happened because union-backed governments have imposed them on unwilling employers.

And every time they have, the employers and their political parties have predicted the death and destruction of the economy.

But, even so, how long since you’ve seen a union telling its bosses they should go easy on the pay rise, but cut working hours? No, I have no doubt that the workers have preferred more bangles and baubles.

Behringer and colleagues, however, have a different take. Their study of developments in the US and Europe over the decades leads them to two conclusions.

First, since the 1980s, average working hours have fallen more slowly as inequality – the gap between high and low incomes – has increased.

Second, in countries with high inequality, employees earning higher hourly wage rates tend to work longer hours than those on lower hourly wage rates.

Both these findings are striking because they contradict economists’ earlier finding that people with higher incomes chose to increase their leisure time.

So, what’s going on? The authors’ explanation is that rising inequality of incomes leads to more “upward status comparisons”. Like most social animals, we are conscious of our social status – where we fit in the pecking order.

And, particularly where there’s a big difference between the top and the bottom, we seek to improve our position.

“The upper middle class emulates the consumption norms of the rich, and sacrifices leisure time to do so. Because the rich also increase their spending on status goods such as housing, education, etc as their incomes rise, the middle class feels pressure to keep up,” they say.

“After all, what constitutes ‘a good place to live’ or ‘a good education’ is essentially defined in comparison to the standards that the upper income groups largely determine.”

Another of their findings is that working hours are more likely to be shorter when wage bargaining is centralised and government social benefits in kind (but not in cash) are more adequate.

One possible explanation, they say, is that centralised wage bargaining reduces status conflict because workers can decide collectively to avoid a “positional arms race” to allow shorter working hours and more leisure.

They find that social benefits in kind rather than cash are associated with lower hours of work. This may be because the direct provision of goods and services by governments reduces the need for status-oriented private spending on goods and services.

Education has many dimensions. It broadens the mind, it helps you get a better-paying job, and it’s a “positional good” – it helps people judge your social status.

"The extent to which the education sector is organised through private markets is found to be associated with longer working hours among workers who themselves have high levels of education,” the authors say.

Get it? If governments provided better healthcare and public schools, more people would be content to use the publicly provided services along with everyone else, and fewer people would feel the need to work longer to afford private hospitals and schools.

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It's not the wolf at the door that's driving women to work harder

Why do mothers go out to work? Why are more women doing paid work than ever before? And why are more of those women working full-time? At a time when so many are struggling with the cost of living, it’s easy to conclude that more women are having to work more hours just to keep up. But I think that sells women short.

Worse, it’s a fundamental misreading of perhaps the greatest social change of our age: the economic emancipation of women.

I don’t doubt that women are just as concerned about the cost of living as men, maybe more so if they’re in charge of the family budget. Nor do I doubt that, if you ask a woman why she’s been doing more paid work lately, the cost of living’s likely to be mentioned.

But things are not always as they seem. For instance, when people complain about the cost of living, their focus is on rising prices. But prices rise almost continuously. What matters more is whether wages are rising as fast as prices are – or, preferably, a little faster.

It’s true that the prices for goods and services have risen at a much faster rate than normal over the past two years or so. But the real problem is that wages – which usually do keep up – have been falling behind since the start of the pandemic. Yet people are far more conscious of the rising prices than of the weak wage growth.

Another distinction that’s clearer to economists than to normal people is between the cost of living and the standard of living. When people have trouble maintaining the same standard of living as their friends – a comparable car, comparable house, comparable private school – they would often rather blame the cost of living than their need to keep up with the Joneses.

No, what’s driving the change in women’s lives – causing them to behave very differently from their grandmothers – isn’t the cost of living, it’s education. And with education has come aspiration. Aspiration to put their learning to work, to have a career as well as a family, and to be treated equally with men.

I think it all started sometime in the 1960s when, for some unknown reason, the parents of the rich world accepted that their daughters were just as entitled to a good education as their sons. Everything flows from that fateful change in social attitudes and behaviour. What father today would dream of telling his daughter that, being a girl, she didn’t need an education?

The trouble for boys is that girls do education better. It’s now several decades since the number of girls going to university first exceeded the number of boys.

That being so, the figures for two-income families should come as little surprise. The latest report from the federal government’s Australian Institute of Family Studies, Employment patterns and trends for families with children, finds that in 2022, both parents were employed in 71 per cent of couple families with children under 15. This is up from 56 per cent in 2000, and 40 per cent in 1979.

Within those couple families, the proportion with both parents working full-time was 31 per cent in 2021, up from 22 per cent 12 years earlier. The proportion with one parent working full-time and the other part-time is unchanged at 36 per cent.

Only 4 per cent of these families involved fathers who weren’t working and mothers who were. (Which leaves the young men in my immediate family looking good.)

But there’s something else you need to understand. In the days when there weren’t many two-income families, this gave them a distinct advantage in the housing market. They could afford a better house than their peers.

Once most young home-buying couples have two incomes, however, their greater purchasing power gets built into the prices of the kind of houses they buy, so that what began as an advantage turns into a requirement.

Now it’s the couples who choose not to have both partners working who’ll have trouble affording a home comparable to those of other couples. They’ll have to accept a lower standard of living.

Similarly, it’s a misconception to say, as some do, that you need to have both parents working to afford a family. No, you just have to accept a lower standard of living.

I’ve long suspected that the rise of the two-income family helps explain the growing practice of sending kids to private schools. Two incomes make this easier to afford – though this, too, gets built into the size of the fees the schools can get away with charging.

There’s no reason a mother – or a father – who chooses to have a career should feel guilty about it. But I suspect some double-income couples find it easier to justify if they can say that the extra money is buying their kids a better education.

Sorry, a mountain of evidence says that, once you allow for the parents’ socio-economic status, private schools don’t add to students’ academic performance. Buyer beware.

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Business cries poor on wages, even as profits mount

Don’t believe anyone – not even a governor of the Reserve Bank – trying to tell you the Fair Work Commission’s decision to increase minimum award wages by 5.75 per cent is anything other than good news for the lowest-paid quarter of wage earners.

Because they are so low paid, and mainly part-time, these people account for only about 11 per cent of the nation’s total wage bill. So, as the commission says, the pay rise “will make only a modest contribution to total wages growth in 2023-24 and will consequently not cause or contribute to any wage-spiral”.

But that’s not the impression you’d get from all the wailing and gnashing of teeth by the main employer group, the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry. It claims “an arbitrary increase of this magnitude consigns Australia to high inflation, mounting interest rates and fewer jobs”.

These are the sort of dramatics we get from the Canberra-based employers’ lobby before and after every annual wage review. They lay it on so thick I doubt anyone much believes them.

But it’s worse than that. In the age-old struggle between labour and capital – wages and profits – most economists have decided long ago whose side they’re on, and long ago lost sight of how one-eyed they’ve become.

For a start, many of the talking heads you see on telly work for big businesses. They’re never going to be caught saying nice things about pay rises.

Econocrats working for conservative governments have to watch what they say. And parts of the media have business plans that say: pick a lucrative market segment, then tell ’em what they want to hear.

In my experience, there’s never any shortage of experts willing to fly to the defence of the rich and powerful, in the hope that some of the money comes their way.

But I confess to being shocked in recent times by the way the present Reserve Bank governor, Dr Philip Lowe, has been so willing to take sides. The way he preaches restraint to ordinary workers struggling to cope with the cost of living, but never urges businesses to show restraint in the enthusiasm with which they’ve been whacking up their prices.

It’s true that Lowe has a board that’s been stacked with business people, but that’s been true for all his predecessors, and they were never so openly partisan.

When businesses take advantage of the excessively strong demand that Lowe himself helped to create, that’s just business doing what comes naturally, and must never be questioned, even in an economy characterised by so much oligopoly – big companies with the power to influence the prices they charge.

But when employees unite to demand pay rises at least sufficient to cover the rising cost of living, this is quite illegitimate and to be condemned. The more so when a government agency such as the Fair Work Commission acts to protect the incomes of the poorest workers.

On Friday, the commission set out what has long been the rule for fair and efficient division of the spoils of the market system between labour and capital: “In the medium to long term, it is desirable that modern award minimum wages maintain their real value and increase in line with the trend rate of national productivity growth”.

In other words, wage rises don’t add to inflation unless their growth exceeding inflation exceeds the nationwide (not the particular business’) trend (that is, over a run of years, not just the last couple) rate of growth in the productivity of labour (production per hour worked).

But last week, in his appearance before a Senate committee, Lowe was twisting the rule to suit his case, setting nominal (before taking account of inflation) unit labour costs (labour costs adjusted for productivity improvement) not real unit labour costs as the appropriate measure.

He told the senators that growth in labour costs per unit of 3 or 4 per cent a year was adding to inflation because the past few years had seen no growth in the productivity of labour (which, of course, is the fault of the government, not the businesses doing the production).

This is dishonest. What he was implying was that wage growth should not bear any relationship to what’s happening to prices at the time. Wage growth should be capped at 2.5 per cent a year every year, come hell or high water.

Without any productivity improvement, any wage growth exceeding 2.5 per cent was inflationary. Should the nation’s businesses choose to raise their prices by more than 2.5 per cent, what was best for the economy was for the workers’ wages to fall in real terms.

Now, Lowe is a very smart man, and I’m sure he doesn’t actually believe anything so silly. Like the employer groups, he’s cooked up a convenient argument to help him achieve his KPIs. He sees the inflation rate as his key performance indicator.

He’s got to get it down to the 2 to 3 per cent target range, and get it down quick. He ain’t too worried what shortcuts he takes or who gets hurt in the process.

When he claims that, absent productivity improvement, wage rises far lower than the rate of inflation are themselves inflationary, what he really means is that they make it harder for him to achieve his KPIs.

Clearly, the wage rise that would help him get the inflation rate down fastest is a wage rise of zero. It would plunge the economy into recession, and businesses would have a lot more trouble finding customers, but who cares about that?

It’s not true that sub-inflation-rate pay rises add to inflation. What is true is that the bigger the sub-inflation rise, the longer it takes to get inflation down. But he doesn’t like to say that.

Why’s he in such a hurry he’s happy for ordinary workers to suffer? Because he lies awake at night worrying that, if it takes too long to get inflation down, inflation expectations will rise and a price-wage spiral will become entrenched.

Does Treasury secretary Dr Steven Kennedy also lie awake? Doesn’t seem to. He told the senators last week that “there are no signs of a wage-price spiral developing and medium-term inflation expectations remain well anchored”.

If ever there was a general fighting the last war, it’s Lowe.

Meanwhile, please don’t say business profits seem to be going fine. It may be true, but please don’t say it. Business doesn’t like you saying such offensive things, and business’ media cheer squad goes ape.

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For better housing affordability, try the premier, not the PM

People have been complaining about the unaffordability of houses for as long as I’ve been a journalist. In all that time, governments have professed great concern, while doing nothing of consequence. But I suspect their insouciance can’t last much longer.

Over the years, the prices of houses and apartments have risen much faster that household incomes have risen, gradually lowering the proportion of Australians able to afford a home of their own.

So the problem keeps getting worse and, with interest rates having risen so far so fast, as well as renters now feeling so much pain, it wouldn’t surprise me if, in coming federal and state elections, many younger voters – and some of their parents – were really steamed up about the issue.

If so, both Labor and the Liberals will be vulnerable to minor parties offering solutions – sensible or otherwise. But what could the major parties do to reduce the problem?

Well, nothing that some people wouldn’t vigorously object to. That’s why the political duopoly has done so little for so long.

The unending rise in house prices has been caused by various factors – some under the control of the federal government, some controlled by the states.

If prices keep rising, this suggests that demand is outstripping supply. In general, the feds have more direct influence over the demand for housing, whereas the states have more direct influence over the supply of them.

It’s wrong to assume that all the problems are coming from either the demand side or the supply side. But, of late, economists have been focusing on the supply side, which points the finger at state governments.

At first blush, if house prices are high and rising, this suggests not enough houses are being built. That’s probably true at present, with immigrants coming faster than we’re building new dwellings for them to live in.

But, over the decades, supply has eventually caught up with demand, so that doesn’t explain why prices have been rising for ages.

And, if it was just a matter of building enough houses to accommodate the growing population, cities would just keep spreading out for ever. That would be expensive – with all the extra transport and infrastructure you’d have to build – and not everyone wants to live that far out from the CBD.

So, the real supply issue is not that we should be building enough houses, it’s building enough housing where people want to live. And the truth is that many people want to live closer in.

As the NSW Productivity Commission explains in a new report, state planning systems make it “difficult to build enough new homes where people want to live – close to jobs, transport, schools and other amenities”.

“Instead, the system encourages urban sprawl, forcing people into longer and longer commutes. These policies increase inequality, especially for low and middle-income workers.”

Guess what happens if governments don’t allow enough homes to be built where people want to live? The prices of homes in, or nearer to, the most desirable areas get bid up relative to prices out in the boondocks, forcing up the median price.

As Australia’s population has grown so rapidly over the decades, the populations of Sydney, Melbourne and the other state capitals have increased greatly, but done so mainly by spreading out.

This has made housing more expensive, as people have had to pay more to live in the closer-in, more desirable parts of the city. Inevitably, it’s the better-off who get the best spots and the less well-paid who have to live further out, where the amenity is less.

Everyone’s paying more for their housing, but the well-off pay a smaller proportion of their income than those in the middle and at the bottom. This pushes families to compromise on where they live – further from family, friends and jobs.

The NSW Productivity Commission report says poor housing affordability brings four disadvantages to individual families and the community. It leaves families with less to spend on other things. It reduces the productivity of the nation’s labour because so many people who want to work can’t afford to live near their best employment prospects.

It adds to environmental damage because more workers live further from city centres and endure long, polluting commutes to their jobs.

And it reduces people’s quality of life because so much of our cities’ populations end up too far from the beach, sports arenas, big entertainment venues and other amenities.

So, what can state governments do to reduce these costs and make our lives better?

We should build more new homes in areas closer to the city’s centre. “These areas offer both the richest collection of job opportunities, and a supply of already-built infrastructure and other amenities whose capacity can be leveraged and expanded,” the report says.

What we need to do is build up, not out, and achieve more “infill” of unused or underutilised land close in.

Specifically, the report says, we need three changes. First, raise average apartment heights in suburbs close to the CBD (and to job opportunities).

Second, allow more development around transport hubs, such as train stations, and take advantage of our existing infrastructure capacity.

And third, encourage more townhouses and other medium-density development, and allow more dual-occupancy uses such as granny flats, where higher density is not an option.

The report argues that, even if the new supply of homes targets the high end of town, building more housing closer to the CBD, “downward filtering” means affordability improves everywhere.

The new, more expensive homes near the centre will be occupied by high-income families. But they will leave behind high-quality homes that middle-income families can move to, leaving their homes to be occupied by lower-income families.

NSW Productivity Commissioner Peter Achterstraat says that “if you believe, as I do, that today’s kids deserve the same shot at the Australian dream that my generation had, we need to change our planning system and build near existing infrastructure to make room for them”.

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PwC: How are the haughty chartered accountants fallen

As we watch the Albanese government and the Senate crossbench getting to the bottom of what’s become “The PwC Scandal”, it’s important to join the dots. It’s not just a question of who did what and when, and how they’ll be held accountable for their actions. It’s more a question of how did a formerly highly respected firm of chartered accountants come to behave in such an unethical and possibly illegal way. And how did the federal government allow itself to get into such a compromised position?

It’s an issue that interests me on many levels. There’s a caste system among accountants, and the ones who call themselves “chartered” – acting under a charter from the King – regard themselves as the brahmins.

Before I became a journalist almost 50 years ago, I worked for one of the “big eight” firms of chartered accountants – Australian partnerships that had affiliated with one of the eight big, American-based international firms. (I’m still a fellow of the chartered accountants’ institute.)

The big eight coalesced into today’s big four, with their snappy, slimmed-down names: PwC, KPMG, Deloitte and EY. Historically, the main thing they did was audit publicly listed companies, certifying that their published accounts were “true and fair”. They also gave tax advice and did rich people’s tax returns.

But there’s not much money in auditing, so each of the big four has branched out into providing consulting services to big companies – in a big way. The consultants – few of whom would be accountants – have become the fat tail wagging the chartered dog.

There is much potential conflict of interest between these three activities, and it’s possible this scandal will hasten the separation of the auditors from the consultants – something that should have happened ages ago.

That’s enough about boring accountants, except to say that, if you wonder why PwC has been so slow to send the offending heavies packing, it’s because these businesses aren’t companies with the usual command structure, they’re unwieldy partnerships. “Why should I vote to get rid of one of my partners, when I might be next?” In Australia, PwC has about 900 partners and 8000 staff.

These days, much of the big four’s income is from consulting to federal and state governments. In 2021-22, the feds paid $21 billion for “external labour” – consultants, but also contractors and labour-hire companies. Senator Barbara Pocock, of the Greens, says this is equivalent to 54,000 full-time workers, and compares with 144,000 directly employed federal public servants.

Barrister Geoffrey Watson has asked “why is Australia outsourcing so much of its governing to private enterprise? Policy development and implementation are now routinely taken from the public service and turned over to private consultants.”

To leftie academics, the answer is that it’s part of the rise of “neoliberalism”. To me, its part of the quixotic quest for smaller government and lower taxes, via deregulation and privatisation in all its forms: not just the sale of government-owned businesses, but the provision of publicly funded services such as job search, childcare, aged care and disability care by church and community groups and profit-making businesses.

Plus, in the present case, getting rid of public servants in favour of advice from private consulting firms. At the beginning, the big four had no great understanding of public policy. But they set up offices in Canberra and hired many of the policy experts being let go by government. These people got paid a lot more, and their services sold back to the government at an even higher rate.

What’s not to like? It’s only taxpayers’ money.

Remember that PwC’s questionable behaviour occurred long before the arrival of the Albanese government. It was the Coalition government, particularly under Scott Morrison, that distrusted and disliked public servants.

One of the attractions of paying outside consultants for advice is that, to ensure repeat business, they tend to tell you what they think you want to hear. Whether in auditing or consulting, the notion that anyone can buy genuinely independent advice is a delusion.

According to Andrew Podger, a former senior public servant, the government’s imposition of ceilings on staff numbers and wage bills “led to the use of external labour even when departments knew it didn’t represent value for money”.

Consultants will always give their business’s profits priority over the public interest. When you join the dots, they go from the PwC affair to the problems we encountered years ago with privately owned childcare, the royal commission into aged care, and all the present problems with the cost of the National Disability Insurance Scheme.

The great experiment of finding out whether it’s better for public services to be delivered by the private sector than the tea-drinking public servants has been a resounding failure. And the suggestion that, by dishonouring its confidentiality agreements, PwC may have broken the law, provides a link to the royal commission on banking misconduct, and even to the epidemic of wage theft.

Somehow or other, the “smaller government” policies of recent decades have left many businesses believing they are no longer required to obey the law.

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Gilding the budget lily: Labor brings in the creative accountants

This month’s budget is not as profligate as its critics claim, but nor is it the deficit-disappearing, penny-pinching budget it was tricked up to be.

When ministerial staffers use words to gild the fiscal lily, it’s called spin doctoring. When the government’s bureaucrats show the treasurer and, more particularly, the finance minister how to do it with numbers, it’s called creative accounting.

So, never fear, Jim Chalmers and Katy Gallagher didn’t need to pay PwC a motza to explain how to make the budget seem better than it was.

No, not the way the former NSW Coalition government paid KPMG to show it how to make its budget balance look better by moving the state’s trains off-budget. Nor has the same firm been paid by another part of the state government to write a report on why it was a bad idea.

There was something a bit odd about the media’s treatment of Chalmers’ second budget. Because the budget’s purpose is to reveal the government’s plans for taxing and spending in the coming financial year, the media give all their attention to the budget balance for the coming year.

Which, this time, is expected to be a deficit of $14 billion, rising to $35 billion the following year, with the budget projected to stay in deficit through to at least 2033-34.

Usually, the media ignore the estimated budget balance in the present financial year, which will end on June 30. It’s “old”. But not this year. This time, a surplus of $4 billion is expected.

Once the media got wind of a surplus, they lost interest in anything else. A surplus! First surplus in 15 years! What an achievement. And after being in power for only a year. How could you get more convincing proof of Labor’s skill as a manager of government finances?

Now, let’s be clear. The expected surplus is perfectly believable, and not the product of creative accounting. But it is the media displaying their economic ignorance.

For a start, in a budget of $630 billion a year, in an economy of $2600 billion a year, a surplus of a mere $4 billion is nothing to get excited about. It’s really a balanced budget, just as much as a deficit of $4 billion would be near enough to a balanced budget.

More significantly, the notion that any treasurer, no matter how wonderful, could turn an expected deficit of $78 billion into a surplus of $4 billion in the space of a year is fanciful. If any pollie should get the credit for it, it would have to be Chalmers’ Liberal predecessor, Josh Frydenberg.

Only he had enough time to do the things capable of helping produce such a result. With the benefit of hindsight, what Frydenberg did was greatly overstimulate the economy, adding to a surge in inflation as well as causing the unemployment rate to fall to 3.5 per cent so workers and businesses paid a lot more income tax.

Another way to look at it is that, had Treasury been better at forecasting, Frydenberg could have forecast a return to budget balance in his last budget.

But this didn’t stop Chalmers and his spin doctors from claiming the credit for himself. Consider this from the budget papers: “The improved fiscal outlook since October largely reflects government decisions to return tax upgrades to budget.”

Talk about twisting the truth. Chalmers wants to take all the credit because, confronted with an unexpected surge in tax collections of $88 billion, he only spent a bit of it.

But, surely, it was the silly media that made all the fuss about the surplus, not that nice young Mr Chalmers. Well, that’s certainly what his spin doctors want you to think – all the adulation came from the crowd.

But they were subtly pushing an easily distracted media in a favourable direction. Consider this. The usual practice in the construction of budget tables is to highlight the coming “budget year”. Not this time. This time it was the old year that got highlighted. So, the $4 billion surplus was shown in bold type, not the $14 billion deficit.

(By the way, as The Australian Financial Review has reported, had Frydenberg’s $690 million [yes, million] deficit in 2018-19 – the one that presaged all the Libs’ happy election talk about “back in black” – been calculated using the same accounting rules under which Chalmers’ surplus was calculated, it would have been a surplus of $7 billion. But no, this isn’t a fiddle, either. The decision to change the rules was made, in prospect, many years earlier by some finance minister named Penny Wong.)

Now we get to the creative accounting, which the Centre for Independent Studies’ Robert Carling, a former NSW Treasury officer, has pointed out. The budget papers make much of the claim that “the government’s spending restraint has limited real [note the real] payments growth to an average 0.6 per cent over five years from 2022-23 to 2026-27”.

Wow. Now that’s what I call restraint. What an achievement. Elsewhere in the papers we’re told that this compares with real average spending growth of about 4 per cent in the eight years before the global financial crisis, and 2.2 per cent over the eight years before the pandemic.

Wow. What restraint the Albanese government is showing. Except that pollies usually quote budget figures over the four years of the budget year plus three years of “forward estimates”. So, why is the 0.6 per cent an average over five years?

Because the extra year includes in the sum the pre-budget year ending in a month. And, purely by chance, real government spending in 2022-23 is expected to fall by 4.3 per cent.

By contrast, real spending in the coming year will grow by 3.7 per cent. Then comes projected annual real growth of 0.6 per cent, 1.9 per cent and 1 per cent.

Why the huge fall this year? Partly, I suspect, because of the effect of temporary pandemic spending programs coming to an end. But also because the indexation of various spending programs was lagging the huge rise in the consumer price index, which is the inflation measure used to calculate the “real” change.

What’s worth remembering from this little fiddle is: never trust calculations of average spending growth into the future. The first year will be close to the truth, but the projections for subsequent years will always be way too low because they’re based on the assumption of unchanged policies, whereas it’s certain that spending plans will have grown by the time we get there.

The first treasurer to con me with this averaging trick was Chalmers’ former boss, Wayne Swan. But Swan got his comeuppance by making himself a laughing-stock when he treated Treasury’s forecasts of future budget surpluses as in the bag. Turned out they weren’t.

The assumptions that policies won’t change and that targets will always be achieved are the reason the budget papers’ “medium-term” projections of deficits and debt 10 years into an unknowable future shouldn’t be taken seriously.

In both sense of the word, they are calculated to mislead.

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What they don't tell you about how the budget works

Now we have some space, there are things I should tell you that there’s never time for on budget night. If you don’t know these things, the media can unwittingly mislead you, and the government spin doctors can knowingly mislead you.

A budget’s just a plan for how much income you’re expecting in the coming period, and what you want to spend it on. Governments have budgets and so do businesses and families.

You may think you know a lot about budgeting and that all you need is common sense, but the federal government’s budget ain’t like any other budget you’ve known.

Where people go wrong is assuming the government’s budget is the same as their own household budget, only much bigger. Families budget so they don’t end up spending more than they earn.

But governments often spend more than they raise in taxes – run at a “deficit” – and only occasionally spend less than they raise – run a “surplus”. When they run deficits, they borrow to cover it; when occasionally they run a surplus, they can pay back a bit of it.

Governments can borrow, and keep borrowing, in a way families can’t. Why? Because they can’t go broke. When they run short of money, they can do what no family can do: order all the other families to give them money. It’s called taxation.

And national governments can go one step further and print their own money. Money is just a piece of plasticky stuff that’s worth, say, $50. Why is it worth $50? For no reason other than that the government says it is, and everyone believes it.

Actually, these days the government doesn’t print money so much as create it out of thin air, by crediting bank accounts. This is done not by the government itself, but by a bank the government owns: the Reserve Bank. It created hundreds of billions during the pandemic (although now the Reserve is making the government gradually pay it back, by actually borrowing the money).

Everyone knows that whatever you borrow has to be paid back. What’s more, you have to keep paying interest on the debt until it is paid back. Parents know they have to get any home loan paid back before they retire.

The trouble with a family is that eventually it dies. The kids grow up and start families of their own, then mum and dad pop off. But governments don’t die. The nation’s government acts on behalf of all the families in the country. There are always some families dying, but always others taking their place.

This is why families have to pay back their debts, but governments don’t – and often choose not to. Because governments go on and on, the main way they get on top of their debts is by waiting for the economy to outgrow them, so the size of their debt declines relative to the size of the economy.

Remember, unless you add to it, a debt is a fixed dollar amount, whereas the size of the economy – gross domestic product – grows with inflation and “real” economic growth.

The final thing making government budgets different from family budgets is that a particular family’s budget is too small to have any noticeable effect on the economy, whereas the federal budget is so big – about a quarter the size of the economy – that changes the government makes in its spending and taxing plans can have a big effect on an individual family’s budget and indeed, many families’ budgets.

But it also works the other way: what happens to one family won’t have a noticeable effect on the budget, but what happens to many families – say, everyone’s getting bigger pay rises, or many families are cutting back because they’re having trouble coping with the cost of living – certainly will affect the budget.

What common sense doesn’t tell you is that there’s a two-way relationship between the budget and the economy. The budget can affect the economy, but the economy can affect the budget.

Whenever a treasurer announces on budget night that he (one day we’ll get a she) is expecting the budget deficit to turn into a surplus, the media usually assume this must be because of something he’s done.

Possibly, but it’s more likely to be because of something the economy did. In this month’s budget, it’s because the economy’s been growing strongly, leading families and companies to earn more income and pay more tax on it.

Because many in the media imagine the government’s budget is the same as a family’s budget, they assume that budget deficits are always a bad thing and surpluses a good thing.

Not necessarily. If the budget was in surplus during a recession, that would be a bad thing because it would mean that, by raising more in taxes than it was spending, the budget would be making life even harder for families.

Only when the economy’s growing too fast and adding to inflation pressure is it good to have the budget in surplus and so helping to slow things down. And deficits are a good thing when the economy’s in recession because this means that, by spending more than it’s raising in taxes, the budget’s helping to prop up the economy.

But not to worry. When the economy goes into recession, the budget tends to go into deficit – or an existing deficit gets bigger – automatically. Why? Because people pay less tax and the government has to pay unemployment benefits to more people. Economists call this the budget’s “automatic stabilisers”.

Hidden away in the budget papers you find Treasurer Jim Chalmers quietly admitting he has no intention of trying to pay off the big public debt he inherited. His “overarching goal” is to “reduce gross debt as a share of the economy over time”.

Finally, for a family, a $4 billion surplus is an unimaginably huge sum of money. But for a federal government, it’s petty cash.

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Reach into your pocket, rise of the care economy will come at a cost

From even before the days early last century when people began leaving the farm to work in city factories, the industry structure of our economy has always been changing. In the ’80s, we saw the decline of manufacturing and the rise and rise of the service industries.

We’re probably kidding ourselves, but it seems the pace at which the economy is changing is faster than ever before. What’s certain is that change is occurring in several fields.

As explained in a part of this month’s budget papers I call Treasury’s sermon, it’s happening on at least three fronts. What gets the most attention is our transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy. Then there’s all the change coming from the digital revolution, which is working its way through many industries, with the use of artificial intelligence expected to bring much more change.

But the industry trend that’s doing the most to change how we live our lives is the rise of the “care economy”. On the surface we see childcare, disability care and aged care, but looking deeper we see nurses, allied health professionals, social workers and welfare workers. There are those who work directly with people receiving care, and an army of support workers in clinics, kitchens, laundries and cleaning stations.

By Treasury’s reckoning, the proportion of our workforce employed in the care economy has gone from 2 per cent in the ’60s to 10 per cent today. About 80 per cent of these workers are women, and more than 16 per cent of all working women work in the care economy.

Treasury offers three main reasons for this rise. Most obvious is the ageing of the population, which is greatly increasing the demand for healthcare and aged care.

Less obvious, but more significant, is what Treasury calls “a transition from informal to formal care”. In the old days, women stayed at home to look after young kids, aged parents and anyone with a disability.

But once girls became better educated, more of them wanted to put their education to work in paid employment. So young children went to childcare, oldies went off to a home and, particularly since the advent of the National Disability Insurance Scheme a decade ago, people with disabilities got more professional care.

One of the simple truths of economics is that economies are circular. On the one hand, more women wanted to go out to paid employment. On the other, this created more paid jobs for women in childcare, aged care and disability care.

As medical science advanced, there were more jobs for women in hospitals and clinics, in the allied professions as well as medicine and nursing – which now requires a degree.

Our greater understanding of the way brains develop has prompted us to begin schooling one or two years earlier, and turn childcare into “early childhood education and care”. Play-based learning became a thing. And more childcare workers needed teacher training.

Treasury’s final explanation for the inexorable rise of the care economy is “increased citizen expectations of government”. Just so. Our growing affluence has involved increased demand for services best paid for via the public purse.

All this has a lot further to go. A former government agency expected the demand for care economy workers to double over the next 25 years or so. Fine – but that says we’ll all be paying a lot more tax to cover it.

And there are other reasons the cost of care will be increasing. One is the weird notion that women should be paid as much as men. Another is that we can’t go on exploiting the motherly instincts of women by paying those in caring jobs less than those in uncaring jobs (so to speak).

One reason we can’t go on underpaying care economy workers is that they ain’t taking it any more. There are shortages of workers, and those who do sign up often don’t stay long once they see how tough the work is.

This budget includes the cost of a special, 15 per cent pay rise for aged care workers, awarded by the Fair Work Commission because their work had been undervalued. Nothing to do with the cost of living – that’s on top. Don’t think there won’t be more work-value cases elsewhere in the care economy.

Then there’s the fate of the theory that getting the care delivered by private businesses would be more efficient and so save money. Wrong. They made their profits by cutting quality.

As for the runaway cost of the NDIS, I think it’s more a matter of providers seeing the government as an easy mark. The government’s hoping to limit the cost growth to a mere 8 per cent a year – but we’ll see about that.

In recent times, much of the nationwide growth in jobs has come from the care economy. Which should be a comfort to those wondering where the jobs will come from in future. I don’t see our kids and oldies being left to the care of robots any time soon.

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THE BUDGET, INFLATION AND MACROECONOMIC MANAGEMENT

UBS HSC Economics Day

There’s never been a better time to be studying macroeconomics than this year. If you want to know why economics is interesting and important – why it deals with real-world problems – turn on the radio or television news, read the paper, look on the internet or just look out the window. What you see is people struggling to cope with the cost of living, as prices rise much faster than wages, as the Reserve Bank keeps increasing mortgage interest rates, rents keep rising and Treasurer Jim Chalmers makes sure his budget isn’t worsening inflation, while giving families a little relief from the rising cost of living.

Macroeconomic management involves national governments and central banks trying to smooth the ups and downs in aggregate demand – spending – as the economy moves through the business cycle of boom and bust. The economic managers try to keep the growth in demand as stable as possible because, when growth’s too weak this increases unemployment, while when growth’s too strong this causes inflation. The two tools or “instruments” the economic managers use to stabilise demand are monetary policy (the manipulation of interest rates) and fiscal policy (use of the budget to manipulate government spending and taxation).

When the Covid pandemic broke out in early 2020, the great fear was that our use of lockdowns – ordering everyone to stay at home and leave the house as little as possible – to slow the spread of the virus until a vaccine could be developed would lead to massive unemployment. To prevent this, the economic managers applied extra stimulus to demand. Interest rates were already very low, but the Reserve Bank cut them further. However, the main stimulus came from the federal government increasing government spending and tax concessions by more than $300 billion over two years.

The return to full employment

The result of all this stimulus was that the economy rebounded quickly from the lockdowns and then grew very strongly. As a result, after shooting up to 7.5 pc, the rate of unemployment quickly fell back and kept on falling until it had dropped to 3.5 pc, its lowest in almost 50 years. The rate of under-employment also fell sharply, with the rate of participation in the labour force rising to a record high. As well, an unusually high proportion of the extra jobs created have been full-time. So the one good thing we have to show for the pandemic is our unexpected return to full employment, after an absence of half a century.

The return of high inflation

For a number of years before the pandemic, economic growth was slow, the unemployment rate got stuck above 5 per cent, there was little growth in real wages, and nothing the Reserve Bank did could get the rate of inflation up into its 2 or 3 pc target range.  But about two years ago inflation began shooting up, reaching a peak of 7.8 pc at the end of last year (2022). It has since begun falling back, and was 7 pc in March this year, but this is still way too far above the target band.

Many factors contributed to this surge in inflation. One was shortages of cars, computer chips and many other things, caused by the pandemic’s disruption of their supply. Another was leaps in the world price of fossil fuels and some foodstuffs, caused by the war in Ukraine. These are cases of imported inflation, caused by shortages of supply, not demand. But it’s also clear that the strong growth in demand in our economy following the stimulus and end of the lockdowns is adding to the prices of locally made goods and services. It’s this local source of inflation pressure that has prompted the RBA to increase the official cash rate 11 times since May last year, increasing the rate by 3.75 percentage points to 3.85 pc.

The “policy mix”

Since the 1980s, Australia has followed the practice of giving monetary policy the primary role in achieving “internal balance” – price stability and full employment, aka low inflation and low unemployment. This leaves fiscal policy (the budget) playing a subsidiary role. It assists monetary policy by allowing the budget’s “automatic stabilisers” to improve the budget balance when the economy is booming and monetary policy is trying to restrain demand. Fiscal policy assists monetary policy when the economy is dropping into recession, by allowing the budget’s automatic stabilisers to worsen the budget balance.

Apart from assisting monetary policy, fiscal policy’s primary role is to achieve “fiscal consolidation” – to cut the budget deficit when the economy is recovering from a downturn, so as to limit the growth in the public debt (and the annual interest bill on it). This is so the budget and fiscal policy will be well-placed to be used to support the economy during the next recession or pandemic.

Note, however, that it is good for fiscal policy to take the main stabilisation role from monetary policy during emergencies such as recessions and pandemics. The stage we’re at now is that the emergency has passed, so the primary stabilisation role has passed back to monetary policy and it’s time to get the budget deficit down and keep it low.

The 2023 budget

The former government’s use of the budget to respond to the pandemic caused the budget deficit to blowout to $85 billion (or 4.3 pc of GDP) in 2019-20 and rise to a peak of $134 billion (6.4 pc) in 2020-21.

But most of the pandemic measures were temporary so, with the end of spending measures and the strong recovery causing the budget’s automatic stabilisers to change direction and start tax receipts growing strongly, the following year (2021-22) saw the deficit fall back to $32 billion (1.4 pc).

Mr Chalmers forecast that the budget balance would improve further in the financial year that ends next month, 2022-23, to a tiny surplus of $4 billion (0.2 pc). This further improvement was caused by the continued strong growth in the economy, with more people in jobs, pay tax and not having to get unemployment benefits. Although wages aren’t rising fast enough to keep up with prices, they are rising faster than they were, meaning more of workers’ wages is being lost to “bracket creep”. In other words, it’s the budget’s automatic stabilisers that are doing most to get the deficit down. As well, mining companies are paying more company tax because world prices for our mineral and energy exports have stayed high. So the only credit Mr Chalmers should get for this is for keeping his new spending limited, so that almost all the surge in tax collections went through to the budget bottom line.

In the coming financial year, 2023-24, the economy is expected to slow, while government spending grows faster than tax collections. This should cause the budget to return to a small deficit of $14 billion (0.5 pc) and go a bit higher to about $36 billion (1.3 per cent of GDP) in the following two financial years.

The “stance” of policy adopted in the budget

In deciding whether the budget helps or hinders its efforts to slow the growth in demand (spending) the RBA doesn’t look at particular budget measures. Rather, it looks at the direction and size of the expected change in the budget balance. Mr Chalmers is expecting the budget balance to improve from a deficit of $32 billion in 2021-22 to a surplus of $4 billion in the financial year just ending. This means the gap between how much the budget puts into the economy in spending and how much it takes out in taxes should improve by $36 billion, a tightening equivalent to 1.6 pc of GDP. But in the coming financial year, the budget balance is expected to worsen by $18 billion, a loosening equivalent to 0.7 pc of GDP. Putting the two years together, I think the RBA will conclude the budget in no way hinders its efforts to slow the growth in demand and reduce the upward pressure on prices.

On these forecasts, I judge the “stance” of fiscal policy adopted in the budget to be “mildly contractionary”.

The outlook for the public debt

Because the strength of the economy’s growth means the budget deficit has fallen much faster that was expected this time last year, the outlook for future budget deficits and levels of gross public debt is now not as bad as we’d earlier thought. Whereas a deficit of $78 billion for the financial year just ending had been expected, a surplus of $4 billion is now expected. This means no increase in the debt this year, and no consequent increase in the annual interest bill in this and subsequent years. Over the 12 years to 2033-34, this is estimated to avoid a total of $83 billion in interest payments. It also implies gross debt is now expected to reach a peak of 36.5 pc of GDP in 2025-26, five years earlier and more than 10 percentage points lower than expect in last October’s budget.

The outlook for the economy

With prices rising faster than wages, bracket creep taking a bigger bite out of wage rises and the RBA raising mortgage interest rates, it will be no surprise to see the economy’s growth slow sharply in the coming financial year. The government’s forecasts predict that, after growing by a very strong 3.25 pc in financial year just ending, real GDP will slow to a very weak 1.5 pc.

The main thing driving that slowdown is likely to be slower growth in consumer spending from 5.75 pc to 1.5 pc. This should get the inflation rate down from 6 pc at present to 3.5 pc by next June, then down into the inflation target zone by June 2025.  Wages are expected to grow by 4 pc over the year to next June – but I wouldn’t start spending the money yet. All this is expected to increase the unemployment rate to 4.5 pc, but not until June 2025. 

And if all that sounds a bit too good to be true – it probably is.

The medium-term fiscal strategy

For many years under Liberal and Labor governments, their “medium-term fiscal strategy” was “achieving budget surpluses, on average, over the economic cycle”. This left the government free to run budget deficits during years when the economy was weak, provided these were offset by budget surpluses during years when the economy was growing strongly.

 With the arrival of the pandemic and all the fiscal stimulus it involved, the liberal government changed to a two-part strategy: first, to support demand during the pandemic. But then, second, once the crisis had passed, to “focus on growing the economy in order to stabilise and reduce debt”.

The new Labor government has adopted its own, rather wishy-washy strategy: “to improve the budget position in a measured way, consistent with the overarching goal of reducing gross [public] debt as a share of the economy [nominal GDP] over time”.  The budget “will be improved in a manner consistent with the objective of maintaining full employment. The government will “allow tax receipts to respond in line with changes in the economy, directing the majority of improvements in tax receipts to budget repair”. This means the new government has abandoned the old government’s 23.9 pc cap on the level of tax receipts as a percentage of GDP.

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Our big risk: fix inflation, but kiss goodbye to full employment

If you think getting inflation down is our one big economic worry, you have a cockeyed view of economic success. Unless we can get it under control without returning to the 5 to 6 per cent unemployment rate we lived with in recent decades, we’ll have lost our one great gain from the travails of pandemic: our return to full employment.

And if we do lose it, it will demonstrate the great price Australia paid for its decision in the 1980s to join the international fashion and hand the management of its economy over to the central bankers.

There has always been a tricky trade-off between the twin objectives of low inflation and low unemployment. If our return to full employment proves transitory, it will show what we should have known: that handing the economy over to the central bankers and their urgers in the financial markets was asking for inflation to be given priority at the expense of unemployment.

In his customary post-budget speech to economists last Thursday, Treasury secretary Dr Steven Kennedy began by explaining to academic economists why their claim that the budget was inflationary lacked understanding of the intricacies of economics in the real world.

But his strongest message was to remind economists why full employment is a prize not to be lost.

Whereas early in the pandemic it was feared the rate of unemployment would shoot up to 15 per cent and be difficult to get back down, the massive fiscal (budgetary) stimulus let loose saw it rise only to half that, and the remarkable economic rebound saw it fall to its lowest level in almost 50 years.

“This experience is altering our views on full employment,” Kennedy says. “One of the stories of this budget – one that risks being lost – is the virtue of full employment.”

For one thing, near-record low unemployment and a near-record rate of participation in the labour force are adding to demand and to our capacity to supply goods and services.

This time last year, Treasury was expecting a budget deficit of $78 billion in the financial year ending next month. Now it’s expecting a surplus of $4 billion. Various factors explain that improvement, but the greatest is the continuing strength of the labour market.

As I explained last week, this revision has significantly reduced the projected further increase in the public debt and, in consequence, our projected annual interest bill on the debt every year forever. It has thereby significantly reduced our projected "structural" budget deficit although, Kennedy insists, has not eliminated it.

And getting a higher proportion of the working-age population into jobs – and having more of the jobs full-time – improves our prospects for economic growth and prosperity.

There’s no source of economic inefficiency greater than having many people who want to work sitting around doing nothing. And adding to the supply of labour is not, of itself, inflationary.

But let’s not confuse means with ends. The most important benefit of full employment goes not to the budget or even The Economy, but to those people who find the jobs, or increased hours of work, they’ve long been seeking.

Kennedy reminds us that the greatest benefit goes to those who find it hardest to get jobs. While the nationwide unemployment rate has fallen by 1.6 percentage point since before the pandemic, it has fallen by 3.2 percentage points for youth, and by 2.3 percentage points for those with no post-school education.

This is where we get to Kennedy’s observation that recent experience is altering Treasury’s views on full employment.

The obvious question this experience raises is: why have we been willing to settle for unemployment rates of 5 to 6 per cent for so long when, as he acknowledges, “the low rate of unemployment and high levels of participation [in the labour force] have been sustained without generating significant wage pressures”?

Short answer: because economists have allowed themselves to be bamboozled by modelling results. Specifically, by their calculations of the “non-accelerating-inflation rate of unemployment” – the NAIRU.

As Kennedy says, the unemployment rate consistent with both full employment and low and stable inflation isn’t something that can be seen and directly measured. So, as with so many other economic concepts, economists run decades of inflation and unemployment data through a mathematical model which estimates a figure.

Economists have redefined full employment to be the 5 or 6 per cent unemployment rate their models of the NAIRU spit out. They think using such modelling results makes decisions about interest rates more rigorous.

But that’s not true if you let using a model tempt you to turn off your brain and stop thinking about whether the many assumptions the model relies on are realistic, and whether more recent changes in the structure of the economy make results based on averaging the past 30 years misleading.

It’s now pretty clear that, at least in recent years, NAIRU models have been setting the rate too high, thus leading the managers of the economy to accept higher unemployment than they should have.

There are at least three things likely to make those modelling results questionable. One is that, as a Reserve Bank official has revealed, the models assume inflation is caused by excessive demand, whereas much of the latest inflation surge has been caused by disruptions to supply.

Professor Jeff Borland, of Melbourne University, points out that the increasing prevalence of under-employment in recent decades makes the models’ focus on unemployment potentially misleading, as does the increasing rate of participation in the labour force.

Third, unduly low unemployment and job shortages are supposed to lead, in the first instance, to wage inflation, not price inflation. But this turns to a great extent on the bargaining power of unionised labour, which many structural factors – globalisation, technological advance, labour market deregulation and the decline in union membership – have weakened.

If the NAIRU models adequately reflect these structural shifts I’d be amazed.

What is clear is that the Reserve Bank’s understanding of contemporary wage-fixing is abysmal. As yet, it has no one on its board with wage-fixing expertise, its extensive consultations with business leaders exclude union leaders, and Reserve Bank governor Dr Philip Lowe says little or nothing about wage-fixing arrangements.

And this is despite Lowe’s unceasing worry about the risk of a price-wage spiral and an upward shift in inflation expectations. So far, there’s little evidence of either.

Some increase in unemployment is inevitable as we use the squeeze on households’ disposable income to slow demand and thus the rate at which prices are rising.

But if the Reserve’s undue anxiety about wages and expectations leads it to hit the brakes so hard we drop into recession, and full employment disappears over the horizon, it will be because we handed our economy over to the institution least likely to worry about making sure everyone who wants to work gets a job.

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Climate change will hurt, but we can still be the Lucky Country

What are we in for with climate change? How will it change the environment, the way we live and the way we earn our living? Is it all bad news for the economy, or is there some upside? And, by the way, how much is it costing us as taxpayers?

The previous federal government didn’t want to think about these questions, much less talk about them. You could read the budget papers each year and hardly find a mention.

But all that’s changed with the change of government. So, no surprise that last week’s budget has a lot in it about climate change.

In various parts of the budget papers, the Albanese government acknowledges that, with the globe already having warmed by an average of 1.1 degrees above pre-industrial levels, global warming will continue changing our weather (short-term changes) and climate (longer-term patterns) for the rest of this century.

It will endanger more species and reduce biodiversity. It will adversely affect human health, with more days of extreme heat leading to more deaths of old people.

The productivity of labour and the number of hours worked are expected to decline as temperatures increase, particularly for people who work outdoors in agriculture, construction and some manufacturing.

Treasury expects farming yields to decline, and I expect that, over time, the production of different crops and the grazing of animals will migrate to the parts of Australia where the climate is less unsuitable.

Speaking of migration, you’d expect our population to grow faster where it’s relatively cooler, with fewer people wanting to live where it’s even hotter than it is today.

And that’s before you get to people – refugees, even – moving between countries in response to rising sea levels. Starting, in our case, with people from the islands of the South Pacific.

Treasury says the increased frequency and severity of natural disasters will also lead to reductions in the production of goods and services through disruptions to economic activity, and to the destruction of private property and road, bridge and rail infrastructure.

It shows that the value of insurance claims has steadily increased over the past decade, with temporary peaks caused by the floods in Queensland and NSW in March 2013, Cyclone Debbie and Sydney hailstorms in March 2017, then bushfires and hailstorms in NSW and the ACT in the last quarter of 2019 and the first quarter of 2020.

So far, the greatest insurance claims – $6 billion-worth – were from the floods in south-east Queensland and NSW in the March quarter last year. Then there were (less costly) floods in NSW, Victoria and Tasmania late last year.

Treasury says our economy will be reshaped by both the physical impacts of climate change and by the efforts of the more than 150 countries that have now signed up to the target of net-zero emissions by 2050. What they do will affect us, plus what we ourselves do.

Australia is one of world’s biggest exporters of fossil fuels, so we can expect our exports of coal and gas to decline steadily over the next decade or two, as our overseas customers reduce their own greenhouse gas emissions from burning the dirty fuel they bought from us.

Of course, not all of them will have their own plentiful sources of renewable energy. They’ll have to import it from somewhere, just as they’ve had to import our fossil fuels.

Which gives us an opening. As our great apostle of smart climate change, economics Professor Ross Garnaut, was first to realise, Australia’s huge expanse, full of sun and wind, means we’ll be able to produce far more renewable energy than we need for our own use. And do it cheaply.

Gosh, what good luck we’ve got. Turns out the move to renewables will give us a “comparative advantage” in international trade we didn’t know we had. All we’ve got to do is play our cards right and get in quick before other, less well-endowed countries sign up our potential customers.

The former government wasn’t interested but, as the budget papers make clear, the Albanese government is. The “net-zero transformation”, which represents one of the most significant shifts in the industrial structure of the economy since the Industrial Revolution, “holds major opportunities for Australia, given our endowment of renewable energy sources and our large reserves of many critical minerals,” the papers say.

There is a problem, however. As yet, there isn’t an economic way to ship raw clean electricity and green hydrogen across the sea to other countries.

But this could be a good thing. We can “embed” our renewable energy in our mineral exports by further processing our iron ore into green steel, and our bauxite into green aluminium, before we export them.

Whereas in the old, fossil fuel world the further processing of our minerals before export wasn’t “economic” (profitable) – in the renewables world it could well be economic.

Get it? We could give our declining manufacturing industry a whole new lease on life. What’s more, it would make economic sense to do the further processing out in the regions, close to the solar and wind farms generating the clean electricity.

Implementing such a transformation would require huge capital investment and risk-taking, the early part of which would have to come from the government.

So, yes, climate change – both the bad bits and the good bits – will come at a great cost to the budget, and thus to taxpayers.

The budget papers reveal the Albanese government planning to spend an extra $25 billion on new climate-related programs over several years in its first budget last October, and now a further $5 billion in last week’s budget. Don’t think that will be the last of it.

So, get ready to hand over more in taxes as the government seeks both to ameliorate the costs of climate change and turn the world’s energy transformation to our advantage.

At least now we’ve got a government willing to get off its backside.

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