Australian Economic Review最新文献

The Australian economy has benefited from several decades of extraordinary Chinese expansion. Slowing growth has diminished these gains and geopolitics between China and western democracies has seen restricted commerce between China and Australia. We use a global economic model to assess the consequences were these tensions to restrict all associated commerce, yielding an Australian real GDP contraction of 6 per cent. A ‘bamboo curtain’, restricting all commerce between western democracies and all other regions, would see massive global losses, with Australia's economic welfare impaired most, while some short-run relief could stem from small-country monetary ‘free riding’.

Legislation designed for one purpose may have unrelated side effects. In this article we examine the impact of recent changes in the application of the sole purpose test for artworks to be used as assets in retirement funds on the Australian Aboriginal art market. This is important since art sales represent a significant source of non-government income for remote Australian Aboriginal communities. In this article we estimate the impact of this change and others on the price index based on the hammer prices paid for 13,555 works by 187 artists at art auctions from 1994 to 2019.

The past 40 years have witnessed the growth of government venture capital (GVC) in China. This work reviews the brief history of GVC in China, as an example of emerging markets, and puts forward several major drawbacks. First, it is unclear which bureau is exactly responsible for GVC, resulting in redundant, sometimes conflicting regulations. Second, a lack of integrated financial planning leads to a mismatch between the situation of local enterprises and actual investments. Moreover, due to the lack of a market-oriented management system, GVC fund managers are not fully motivated. We propose corresponding remedies and discuss the implications.

This article is aimed at undergraduate and graduate economics students, as well as public sector economists, who are interested in inequality measurement. It examines the use of the Gini inequality measure to compare income distributions. The implicit distributional value judgements are made explicit, via the use of a particular form of Social Welfare Function. Emphasis is given to the interpretation of changes in inequality.

Our paper examines  trends in gender inequalities in unpaid domestic and care work over the short- and long-term in Australia, including assessing the impact of the COVID-19 lockdowns. We use the concept of time—historical, biographical and transitional—as a framework for our analyses. Drawing on data from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) Survey, we find wide and continuing gender gaps in unpaid work over the past two decades. We demonstrate that parenthood is a far greater producer and exacerbator of gender inequalities in unpaid domestic and care work than COVID-19 lockdowns.

Gender revolution theories of fertility posit that when employed women have extensive child care and household responsibilities, they opt to reduce family size. This study examines how household gender inequality influences decisions to have children. Several possible mediators, including wellbeing, relationship quality, and changes in desired family size, are examined. Results from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) Survey show that household inequality reduces the likelihood of third births when both parents work full-time. This is mediated by relationship satisfaction: when men contribute more to household labour, their partners are more satisfied, which is associated with increased fertility.

When we think of economic activity, and even of work specifically, as economists we tend to overlook work that is not paid. And yet, looking after elderly family members, caring for and educating children, or preparing family dinners, are all essential services to our community and play an important role for individual wellbeing and health and social cohesion. As governments in many developing countries increasingly recognise—including the Australian Government with its recently developed Measuring What Matters Framework—national well-being goes beyond our financial situation and includes health, safety, sustainability and more. Many of those often-overlooked aspects of wellbeing are significantly supported by unpaid work.

One of the challenges for social scientists who are interested in unpaid work as an important input into our national wellbeing is the scarcity of available data. They are not included in administrative records and expensive to measure in surveys. There are two resources Australian researchers can rely on: first, the Australian Bureau of Statistics has recently published a new Time Use Survey (TUS 2020-21), a cross-sectional data set with detailed diary information form participants. And second, the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) Survey includes a range of questions asking respondents about their activities in a typical week. Both are invaluable resources for researchers of unpaid work in Australia.

This issue of the Australian Economic Review devotes its Policy Forum to unpaid work. We present three articles that all use HILDA Survey data and tackle some of the many issues surrounding unpaid work, highlighting its wide-ranging impacts on the way we live. Considering the enormous amount of time we devote to this often overlooked part of our economy, many more questions necessarily remain, and may be explored in future fora. I hope some of our readers may be inspired to make use of Australia's time-use data—both the TUS and the HILDA survey—for further discoveries.

Janeen Baxter, Alice Campbell and Rennie Lee analyse trends in the gender patterns of unpaid labour over time and find that the gender gap in unpaid care work has remained almost unchanged in the last two decades, and any narrowing of the gap in housework is due to women performing less housework without men doing more. A gender gap in unpaid work is already present in 15-year-olds but increases greatly at entry into parenthood. They also find the impact of parenthood on the gender gap in unpaid work to be far greater than that of Victoria's COVID-19 lockdowns, which were among the strictest and longest in the world. That gendered work patterns were moved so comparatively little by even such a drastic change in external circumstances demonstrates the difficulty of changing pervasive norms and behaviours.

But what are the consequences of the gender gap in unpaid work? Nataliya Ilyushina takes a close

This article analyses the research productivity of more than 200 individuals in academe with a PhD in economics and finance from (mostly) Australian universities. We find the number of publications accumulates linearly with experience, while citations increase exponentially, pointing to network effects. Panel regressions indicate: (1) the key role of experience in determining research outcomes; (2) the usual quadratic approach substantially under-estimates the role of diminishing returns to experience; (3) the university where an individual works is mostly unimportant for publications and citations. ‘Prime academic age’, when research has maximum impact, is attained about 11 years after the PhD.

Randomised trials frequently produce surprising findings, overturning conventional wisdom. During the twentieth century, randomised trials became commonplace within medicine, saving millions of lives. Randomised trials within government can now be conducted more cheaply, using administrative data. Just as it might be considered unethical to conduct a randomised trial if a program is indisputably effective, it might be considered unethical not to conduct a rigorous evaluation if a program lacks evidence. Developed within a robust ethical framework, and alongside community consultation, better evaluation can help governments save money and address social disadvantage.