Australian Economic Review最新文献

There appears to be a general movement away from universal child benefits and towards means-testing. In the present article we argue that instead of suppressing the labour supply of middle-income parents by withdrawing the transfer as a function of income, one should consider the alternative of financing a generous universal child benefit by increasing taxation of income. The implications of means-testing compared with a tax-financed universal alternative are discussed analytically in a piecewise linear schedule and by combining information from behavioural and non-behavioural micro-simulation models. Our results provide support for making child benefit universal instead of means-tested.

Mining royalties provide a volatile source of revenue for state governments in Australia. We explore the effects of changes in royalty revenue received by a state government on current-year budget decisions about expenditure, tax revenue and the budget surplus. The literature postulates different models for how lower-level government budget decisions respond to a revenue windfall from a higher level of government. Empirical evidence on these models over 1998–2019 provides strong evidence that over a half of a royalty windfall becomes a change in budget expenditure. Estimates of changes to tax revenues and the surplus are not definitive nor robust.

This paper presents new information about the post-graduation activities of those with a PhD in economics and finance from an Australian university. Approximately 40 per cent have an academic job, while the other 60 per cent work elsewhere or engage in other activities. The analysis includes origin‒destination networks for both the academic and non-academic markets, the determinants of earnings and measures of overqualification and underemployment. The findings of the paper can provide guidance for those completing or contemplating PhD studies.

This article documents the considerable economic support provided to businesses by the Australian Government in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. We find that measures were associated with higher levels of business profitability and savings, a strong recovery in payroll jobs and wages, and mixed effects with respect to business dynamism. We formally evaluate the SME Cashflow Boost, finding costs per job-year saved in the vicinity of $72–83,000 ($US51–59,000) over its first year, implying between 400 and 500,000 job-years saved over this period. Combined with results from previous studies, this suggests between 1.1 and 1.3 million job-years were saved by the SME Cashflow Boost and JobKeeper Payment over their respective first years post-announcement.

Society is facing significant environmental challenges. The effects of climate change, biodiversity loss and environmental degradation are being increasingly felt worldwide. In recent years, researchers have attempted to adapt neoclassical and endogenous growth theory to account for constraints imposed by scarce natural resources. In this article, we review where, and how, researchers tend to incorporate natural resources and natural capital into growth theory. We then outline areas and questions that remain unanswered, including how novel impact investing and the eroding trade-off between GDP and the environment affect growth theory.

During the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 the Australian federal government temporarily expanded the level of cash relief available to the working-age population through supplemental benefit payments, a wage subsidy and allowing lump sum withdrawals from private pensions. Here we examine the scope and direct distributional consequences of these measures. Two in five working-age Australians received at least one of these three forms of transfer over a 12-month window. The median recipient had close to half their pre-COVID-19 income ‘replaced’ by transfers. The programs interacted to create a two-tier welfare safety net that put in place a poverty-alleviating income floor for workers in low-earning occupations and those on unemployment benefits, and provided job certainty and greater direct income support to those with higher incomes. Aggregate weekly incomes were higher during the initial period of COVID-19 than they were pre-COVID-19. Descriptive exercises, such as this, do not provide information about the ‘impact’ of pandemic policies and are limited to what they directly measure. That noted, we raise an important question for decision-makers facing future shocks: at what point is there ‘too much of a good thing’ with crisis cash transfers?

Australia's Privacy Act 1988 is under review with a view to bringing Australia's privacy laws into the digital era, more in line with the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). This article discusses how the GDPR can be refined and standardised to be more effective in protecting privacy in the digital era while not adversely affecting the digital economy that relies heavily on data. We argue that an ideal data policy should be informative and transparent about potential privacy costs while giving consumers a menu of opt-in choices into which they can self-select.

This article investigates the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the long-term economic growth of South Africa. We embed an epidemiological model in a modified Solow–Swan model and explore various channels such as morbidity, mortality, unemployment, loss of school days and capital accumulation. We demonstrate that COVID-19 will lower the average annual growth rate of GDP per capita of South Africa by 0.07 percentage points in the next four decades, a 25 per cent decline relative to the no-COVID benchmark. We show that human capital losses due to school closures account for more than half of the economic slowdown.