Australian Economic Review最新文献

Detailed labour market and economic data are often released infrequently and with considerable time lags between collection and release, making it difficult for policy-makers to accurately assess current conditions. Nowcasting is an emerging technique in the field of economics that seeks to address this gap by ‘predicting the present’. While nowcasting has primarily been used to derive timely estimates of economy-wide indicators such as GDP and unemployment, this article extends this literature to show how big data and machine-learning techniques can be utilised to produce nowcasting estimates at detailed disaggregated levels. A range of traditional and real-time data sources were used to produce, for the first time, a useful and timely indicator—or nowcast—of employment by region and occupation. The resulting Nowcast of Employment by Region and Occupation (NERO) will complement existing sources of labour market information and improve Australia's capacity to understand labour market trends in a more timely and detailed manner.

The COVID-19 pandemic saw governments around the world suddenly accumulate substantially higher levels of public debt. We consider the level of debt entered into by Australia's federal, state and territory governments and compare this against three metrics for debt sustainability. Using these measures, we find that current and future public debt levels sit within what is regarded as sustainable by scholarly and practitioner opinion. However, we note that recent increases in interest rates will challenge this. We conclude by outlining a range of economic, social and policy challenges arising from the new high public debt environment.

At the zero lower bound, the expected duration of zero interest rate policy has two dimensions which are key to understanding the stance of monetary policy: (i) the actual duration communicated by the central bank or expected by the private sector, and (ii) the duration prescribed by the underlying monetary policy rule—the rule that is in place in normal times. In a small open economy, the duration prescribed by the underlying monetary policy rule depends in part on foreign economic conditions. including foreign monetary policy. A monetary policy tightening abroad depreciates the exchange rate, increases inflation and shortens the duration prescribed by the monetary policy rule. We argue that a monetary policy strategy like yield curve control that aims to pin down a given duration is risky when economic shocks can change the duration prescribed by the underlying monetary policy rule.

This article provides an introduction to the measurement of welfare gains from the introduction of a new good, based on the concept of the ‘virtual price’ and standard expressions for welfare changes arising from price changes.

How large is Australia's fiscal space? Blanchard (2019) shows that as long as the real interest rate $��R�$ is below the real growth rate $�\; ��G�$, a government can sustain a positive primary deficit with a constant (or even declining) ratio of public debt to GDP. In this article, we explain the neutral real interest rate and the reasons for its decline. Then, we discuss the results of a companion paper, Domínguez and Quiggin (2022), in which we quantify the fiscal space for Australia and find that a permanent increase in the primary deficit can be afforded up to reaching a debt to GDP ratio of 79 per cent. Furthermore, this so-called ‘free lunch’ in the fiscal space can be expanded if debt is used to finance public investment.

The Australian Government has committed to addressing the recommendations on workforce made by the 2021 Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety. Implementation requires a sound information base but examination of the 2020 Aged Care Workforce Census finds it inadequate for these purposes. Only half the reported 32 per cent workforce increase is substantiated on the basis of funding increases and the balance attributed to extraneous factors that inflated results. These limitations are discussed with reference to four major areas of workforce planning and policy and conclusions are drawn about margins for change associated with each of these areas.

The current paper investigates whether the exchange rate asymmetrically influences domestic investment in China. To this end, the nonlinear autoregressive distributed lag (NARDL) process is applied to investment data disaggregated by China's 31 provinces. We discover that there is evidence that the ups and downs of the yuan have asymmetric impacts on domestic investment for some provinces, though not all, in both the long- and short-run.

This article introduces several diagrams relating to relative income mobility, positional change within the distribution and poverty persistence. They are easy to produce and, at a glance, provide valuable information about income mobility and poverty dynamics, given information about the incomes of a cohort of individuals in two time periods.

There are many financial paths that link different savers who provide funds to different business investors. Path options considered include combinations of corporate and unincorporated businesses, resident and non-resident savers, debt and equity, and distributed and retained earnings. These different financial paths have different mixes of attributes valuable to savers and investors. As a result, the options are imperfect substitutes. Australian capital income taxation varies across the different financial path options. As a result, effective tax rates and the effects of reforms to company income tax vary across the funding options. Together, the imperfect substitute and different tax treatments reduce the impact of proposed changes in company income taxation on incentives to, and rewards from, business investment.