Economic Papers最新文献

The Hilmer Review and National Competition Policy reforms were an important part of the 1990s productivity surge and have been estimated to have delivered a permanent 2.5 per cent lift in GDP. I outline the key elements of these reforms and identify seven lessons for modern competition reformers. In the 2020s, with the startup rate falling and market concentration rising, boosting competition is one way of increasing productivity and improving the dynamism of the Australian economy.

The COVID-19 pandemic has wreaked social and economic havoc across the globe. This article addresses an aspect of trust that has not received wide attention in the context of the pandemic: how relational trust can affect compliance behaviour with health campaigns. This article uses a unique dataset of people receiving a COVID test after suspicion of infection. We use regression analysis to study the relation between compliance with mobility restrictions and institutional and relational trust. We find that trusting that close relations will be there for you in the case of falling ill is associated with a significant increase in the probability of complying with health campaigns as is trust that public institutions will respond appropriately to the pandemic. Additionally, we find no statistical relationship between compliance and trust in media outlets nor compliance and trust that community members (neighbours, co-workers or others) will care for you. The findings suggest that enhancing trust may improve compliance with mobility restrictions, however, increasing trust in specific groups may not aid in the effectiveness of some health campaigns. Importantly, nudging people towards compliance could be achieved by emphasising in campaigns that your behaviour could influence the health of those who you care about.

The discipline of economics encompasses broad skillsets with diverse applications in employment markets and industries. Studies of labour market prospects for economics graduates are relatively dated particularly in the light of developments such as declining interest in economics in high school and university. This study examines the labour market outcomes of Australian economics graduates, at the bachelor and postgraduate levels, using a national dataset. We observe strong employment prospects for graduates in economics after graduation, in terms of full-time employment and salaries. Obtaining a postgraduate qualification appears to pay off, with master's and PhD graduates experiencing more favourable employment outcomes than bachelor's graduates. Substantial proportions report being overqualified for their jobs although this proportion is comparable to those reported for the broader Australian graduate labour market. Reassuringly, those initially overqualified transition out and overqualification reduces in the longer term. Most economics graduates become economists, but many others enter a wide array of other occupations. Of those who start out in non-economist professions, there is a 42 per cent chance that they transition to economist roles after 2.5 years. In summary, an economics degree leads to favourable employment and earnings and should still be considered an attractive choice for prospective students.

The industry diversity thesis of economic resilience to economic shocks is embedded in community development policy across Australia. The idea being that in the event of an economic shock some industries will prove more recession-proof than others. The greater the industry diversity, the greater the likelihood of off-setting industry effects, resulting in greater economic resilience. The COVID-19 pandemic and the associated restrictions created a unique natural experiment to explore whether the industry diversity thesis holds true under the conditions of a global health pandemic. In this policy paper, we use JobKeeper applications as a proxy for decreased economic resilience. We explore if Australian local government areas (LGAs) with higher industry diversity had less necessity for JobKeeper. We also briefly consider if concentrations of certain industries acted as a better economic buffer to the COVID-19 economic shock. We observe that as diversity increases, economic resilience strengthens except for Victoria (where the association is inverted). This observation has important implications for current and future policy formation and implementation across all layers of government.

Recent research has documented the immediate negative impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on household and business consumption, but there is still limited investigation into the medium-term effects in specific consumption categories. This paper addresses this gap using a vector autoregression analysis of a system of aggregated consumer final demand across Australia. We highlight the importance of studying a demand system, as opposed to investigating independent consumption categories, due to the interactive evolution of consumption during the pandemic. Modelling the paths of various consumption categories in response to shocks from one another, we find that, despite the large and abrupt shocks to consumption during the first two quarters of 2020, most categories reverted to pre-COVID levels when restrictions were lifted. Importantly, transportation had the largest and most persistent decline. Overall, shocks to sectors other than food, alcohol and education were outside the counterfactual forecast confidence intervals estimated based on pre-COVID information.

This article introduces the Bayesian structural time series (BSTS) as a potential tool for forecasting in the tourism literature. Using data on Australian tourist arrivals in New Zealand, the forecasting accuracy of the estimated model is evaluated using a fixed partitioning approach. The MAPE of the fitted model is 3.11 per cent for the validation stage and 2.75 per cent for the test stage. The BSTS outperforms two other competing models both in the validation and test stage. In addition to forecasting, BSTS also estimates the trend, trend slope, and seasonality that change over time.

This paper analyses the COVID recession and the large fiscal policy response by modelling scenarios using a macro-econometric model. The COVID recession mainly arose from lower household consumption of certain services under COVID social distancing. The fiscal response to compensate for income losses in those service industries meant that unemployment was around 2 percentage points lower for 3 years than otherwise would have been the case. However, there was over-compensation: for every $1 of income the private sector lost under COVID, fiscal policy provided $2 of compensation. Following the end of social distancing, the aftereffects of over-compensation and over-prolonged loose monetary policy are modelled to have generated excess demand that temporarily added up to 3 percentage points to the annual inflation rate. Also, three forms of over-compensation in the JobKeeper program that led the fiscal response created disincentive effects and inequities. The primary lesson for future pandemics is that fiscal policy should compensate, but not over-compensate, for income losses, both in aggregate and at the program level. The secondary lesson is that monetary policy needs to take more account of the stimulus already provided by the fiscal response, so that interest rates do not remain very low for too long.

This study examines inflation dynamics in Indonesia, a large archipelagic country, using the Phillips curve specification. Utilising province-level data from 2015 to 2019, the analysis accounts for regional interaction across Indonesian provinces and estimates spatial spillovers. To address the challenges of applying spatial methods to the world's largest archipelagic nation, two new approaches for the spatial weight matrix criteria are introduced: contiguity-based from artificial boundaries (Thiessen polygons) and trade-based from the Interregional Input–Output Tables. Furthermore, exploiting a new dataset, the study contrasts alternative measurements of inflation and output gap. These distinctions yield new findings. The results indicate the presence of a conventional Phillips curve in Indonesia. Different measures of inflation and the output gap have distinct spatial spillover effects.

The paper attempts to analyse the grotesque dimensions of gender disparity of lockdown as a policy response to the pandemic crisis. In doing so, we develop a multi-sectoral distortion-ridden general equilibrium model which applies to small open developing economies. Lockdown results in supply-chain disruptions (SCDs), physical restrictions on labour gathering, adverse demand shock and an escalation of demand for the high-skilled capital-intensive product. Not only factor intensity ranking but also contact intensity of sectors has several dimensions. These dimensions include inter alia female labour force participation, the burden of unpaid domestic chores on women and gender wage disparity with unemployment as well.

Prior research has identified outward-oriented policies as a far superior approach to achieving economic growth. Whilst trade openness determines economic growth in the short run, institutional quality is critical to long-term viability. However, the direct and indirect effects of institutions have been understudied, particularly for the Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. This study addresses this issue by estimating long-run and short-run elasticities using the system GMM and pooled mean group models and identifying its country-specific impact using the fully modified ordinary least square model. According to the findings, trade and institutions are only short-run complements of economic growth. In the long run, however, the lack of good governance limits the positive impact of trade openness.